Legal scholars, judges, lawyers and law students read case law to find out what the law is. Gijs van Dijck, together with the eScience Center, is developing a technology that will accelerate the process of searching through case law. Moreover, it allows to discover new patterns and information that cannot be discovered using traditional case law analysis methods. The aim is to develop a technology that allows searching through case law, automatically visualising relationships among court decisions, and more.

Gijs has fifteen students working with the visualisation tool, with the first results expected upcoming summer. “One of our students had a master class on a topic on which the visualisation tool was applied. It was interesting to hear from the student that he had identified the same important decisions as the expert, and that he saw things the expert had not discovered”, says Gijs. This technology has the potential to disrupt the way legal scholars, practitioners and students search case law. But rest assured: the technology will not replace humans. Reading and interpretation remains invaluable, also with the technology. The project focuses on Dutch case law, but this technology could be expanded to other countries and jurisdictions. 

 This blog is published on Law Blogs Maastricht
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