The German Federal Courts Dataset

This paper introduces the German Federal Courts Dataset (GFCD) as a resource for empirical legal scholars, with the objective of inspiring more European lawyers to engage with empirical aspects of civil-law adjudication. To that end, several thousand pages of German court documentation were digitized, transcribed into machine-readable tables (ready to be imported into statistics software), and published online (www.richter-im-internet.de).

To simultaneously explore innovative ways of sharing public-domain datasets, the data were modeled as linked open data and imported into the Wikidata repository for use in any computational application.The dataset covers the years of 1950 to 2020 and is about 573 MB large.