Mining Legal Arguments: Proportionality in German Constitutional Court Judgments

by Kilian Lüders (HU Berlin)

Thursday 14 Nov 2024, 15:00 → 17:00 Europe/Berlin

Hybrid Event: Lecture Hall (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory / online)

The proportionality test is a key argumentation technique in German public law and in the jurisprudence of the German Federal Constitutional Court (GFCC). Despite its widespread recognition, it has been criticized for being applied too broadly and for giving courts too much flexibility in their decision-making.

This presentation explores how digital humanities and natural language processing methods can be used to assess legal arguments, focusing on a case study of the proportionality test in GFCC decisions conducted by the LLCon research group (https://www.lehrstuhl-moellers.de/llcon). The project involved manually annotating decisions and conducting descriptive analysis, while also applying machine learning to automate the recognition of proportionality tests in case law.

This approach offers new insights into the court's (entire) case law and the importance of the proportionality test. However, the complexity of legal argument mining—particularly in dealing with sophisticated legal reasoning—remains a significant challenge for automated analysis.

Recommended Literature:

Lüders, K., Stohlmann, B. Classifying proportionality - identification of a legal argument. Artif Intell Law (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-024-09415-9

DER STAAT, 63 (2024) 2: 217– 252
https://doi.org/10.3790/staa.2024.356614

Classifying proportionality - identification of a legal argument.pdf