Building Corpora for the Philological Study of Swiss Legal Texts

Abstract

We describe the construction of two corpora in the domain of Swiss legal texts: The DS21 corpus is based on the Collection of Swiss Law Sources and contains historical legal texts from the early Middle Ages up to 1798; the Swiss Legislation Corpus (SLC) is based on the Classified Compilation of Swiss Federal Legislation and contains all current Swiss federal laws. The paper summarizes the key properties of both corpora, discusses issues encountered while building them, and outlines some applications.