Judgments as bulk data

Abstract

Should court judgments be publicly available for text and data mining purposes? This article shows that the arguments for and against access to judgments conflate different understandings of what judgments are. On one view, judgments are seen as a ‘jurisprudential’ category, whereas the other view regards them as something ‘factual’. Once it is understood that these views and the claims based on them do not fight over the same territory, it should be easier to make judgments more widely available, including for the purposes of computational analysis of judgments as bulk data. The purpose of this article is to help to clear the ground for the debate around access to judgments as bulk data and highlight some relevant considerations for the preferred licencing regime concerning judgments.