The European Union Case Law Corpus (EUCLCORP): A Multilingual Parallel and Comparative Corpus of EU Court Judgments

Abstract

The empirical approach to the study of legal language has recently undergone profound development. Corpus linguistics study has, in particular, revealed previously unnoticed features of the legal language at both the lexico-grammatical and discourse level. Existing resources such as legal databases, however, do not contain functionalities that enable the application of corpus linguistics methodology. To address this gap in the context of EU law we developed a multilingual corpus of judgments that allows scholars and practitioners to investigate in a systematic way a range of issues such as the history of the meaning(s) of legal term, the migration of terms between legal systems, the use of binominals or the distribution of formulaic expressions in EU legal sub-languages. As well as being the first multilingual corpus of judgments it is also the largest legal multilingual corpus ever created. Since it contains case law from two sources (the Court of Justice of the European Union and EU national courts) it is also the largest comparable corpus of legal texts. The aim of the corpus is to contribute to the further development of the emerging field of language and law.