Judicial Person Extraction for Swiss Court Rulings

Introduction

We group parties (with their legal counsels), lawyers, clerks, and judges involved in a court decision as judicial persons. We define the Judicial Person Extraction task as follows: Extracting judicial persons’ names, gender, and occupation from court decisions. The results of this task can be used to study bias in the judicial system (e.g. lawyers of a specific gender are more successful at a specific court, are men more likely to go to prison?) This project will extract judicial persons from the rubrum (header) of Swiss court decisions.

Example

From the rubrum of the decision of the Zurich Administrative Court AB.2009.00001:

Beschluss

der 4. Kammer

vom 13. Januar 2010

Mitwirkend: Abteilungspräsident Jso Schumacher (Vorsitz), Verwaltungsrichter Lukas Widmer, Verwaltungsrichterin Maja Schüpbach Schmid, Gerichtssekretär Philip Conradin.

In Sachen

A, vertreten durch Rechtsanwalt B,

Beschwerdeführerin,

gegen

Staat Zürich, vertreten durch die Volkswirtschaftsdirektion des Kantons Zürich,

Beschwerdegegner,

betreffend Aufsichtsbeschwerde / Kostenauflage,

You would extract the following JSON:

{

“president”: {“firstname”: “Jso”, “lastname”: “Schumacher”, “gender”: “male”},

“judges”: [{“firstname”: “Lukas”, “lastname”: “Widmer”, “gender”: “male”}, {“firstname”: “Maja”, “lastname”: “Schüpbach Schmid”, “gender”: “female”}],

“clerks”: [{“firstname”: “Philip”, “lastname”: “Conradin”, “gender”: “male”}],

“complainant”: [{“name”: “A”, “legal counsel”: “B”}],

“respondent”: [{“name”: Volkswirtschaftsdirektion des Kantons Zürich”}]

}