Introducing twin corpora of decisions for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ)

Abstract

In this article I present the first two of a new series of open and high-quality international legal data sets: comprehensive, fully reproducible, human- and machine-readable open access collections covering one hundred years of case law of the primary judicial organs of the United Nations and the League of Nations: the Corpus of Decisions: International Court of Justice (CD-ICJ) and the Corpus of Decisions: Permanent Court of International Justice (CD-PCIJ). Each corpus is designed to capture in its entirety the published case law of its eponymous Court, including majority opinions (judgments, advisory opinions and orders), but also the minority opinions annexed to each decision (declarations, separate opinions and dissenting opinions). The corpora are enriched with useful metadata to enhance text-as-data research and enable stand-alone metadata analyses. While each corpus can stand on its own, the twin corpora are designed to be perfectly interoperable for the purposes of analyses that wish to treat the ICJ and PCIJ as a continuous entity. The most recent versions of the corpora will always be available open access at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3826444 (CD-ICJ) and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3840479 (CD-PCIJ).