barjacks / bg_copy_paste

An evaluation of how often the Swiss Supreme Court copies text elements from previous appeals

Copy-Paste at the Swiss Supreme Court

The judges have worked on 77'000 appeals from 2007 up until July 2017. Attornies claim that judges and law clerks are increasingly copy-pasting elements from previous verdicts. This analysis uses Python to establish whether this is true.

The 77'000 verdicts, the data bases of the analyses, can be downloaded here. Unzip it and make sure the data folder is in the same folder as the jupyter notebook you're working in.

The Swiss Supreme court is divided into four sections of law:

1. Sozialrechtliche Abteilungen I & II
2. Öffentlichrechtliche Abteilungen I & II
3. Zivilrechtliche Abteilungen I & II
4. Strafrechtliche Abteilung

And each appeals in each section are in German, French and Italian. Italian I excluded as there are only a few thousand of decisions. Splitting them into the various section does not allow for enough text.

The following iPython Notebooks contain 14 analyses: Each court section in French and German.