U.S. Federal Judicial Precedent Citations in Context

LePaRD is a collection of U.S. federal judicial citations to precedent, built by extracting quotations and their preceding context from millions of judicial opinions. Each row corresponds to a quoted passage from prior case law used in a specific context, with a long-tailed distribution of citation frequency.

Use Cases

• Analyze the long-tailed distribution of passage citation frequency to identify landmark versus niche legal precedents.
• Train a language model to predict the context preceding a quoted passage from prior case law.
• Map the network of judicial citations between cases using extracted quotation data.
• Study the evolution of legal argumentation by analyzing the context in which specific passages are cited over time.

Strengths

• Built on millions of expert judicial decisions.
• Extracts both quotations to precedents and the preceding context from opinions.
• Described as a 'massive collection' and tagged as 'Large Scale'.

Limitations

• Specific scale metrics like row count, column count, and file size are unknown.
• The raw description is truncated, limiting full understanding of data structure and completeness.
• Potential for bias towards more frequently cited or digitized federal opinions.

Provenance

Source

U.S. federal judicial opinions.

Collection Method

Extracted quotations to precedents and preceding context from judicial opinions.

Freshness

Last updated on 2024-09-26.

Geography

United States