A Rule 74 for Italian Judges and Lawyers

Abstract

Rule 74 of the Rules of the Court (March 2022) states that any judgment of the European Court of Human Rights must contain some basic information (such as the names of the parties, agents, lawyers or advisers of the parties and a report of the procedure followed) followed by some well-defined steps of the decision: the facts of the case; a summary of the arguments of the parties; the legal reasons; operational provisions. Similar criteria are also established for the drafting of the appeals of lawyers. This set of rules has the function of giving a rigid and predetermined structure to the introductory acts of the parties and to the decision of the Court with reference to both the purely formal elements and the essential elements of the judgement in a substantive sense. The proposal for a Rule 74 for Italian judges is not an end in itself. The paper discusses how this, combined with a similar rule for lawyers’ acts, can play an essential role in the application of AI technologies to law. Indeed, the availability of a dataset composed of decisions having very homogeneous structures can facilitate, as will be shown, the application of Natural Language Processing and machine learning techniques and finally a better performance in different activities such as prediction, summarization, knowledge extraction.