New database dedicated to the Israeli Supreme Court

A new database is now available to provide researchers with statistical data on the Israeli Supreme Court’s judgments.

The Israeli Supreme Court Database  (ISCD) is a Big-Data database encoding information from all final Israeli Supreme Court decisions in panel cases opened between 2010 and 2018 (16,109 cases and 48,634 opinions). For each judicial opinion, the database contains 71 types of data on the litigants, their legal representation, the Supreme Court proceedings, the proceedings in the lower court (in the case of appeals), the legal category and topic of the ruling, and its results.

The collection and processing of data for this project involved the data mining of Supreme Court rulings and the development of algorithms designed to automatically code the textual information contained in the rulings. Along with the innovative development of a database generated through automated textual analysis, the data was processed and reviewed by a team of third-year law students, under the supervision of Dr. Keren Weinshall and Prof. Lee Epstein.

The ISCD is published online, on an open website and free of charge. The database is primarily intended to serve as research infrastructure for the scientific community. In addition, the site is now being designed to enable decision-makers, journalists and the public to find precise data on trends in judicial decision-making – without requiring prior statistical knowledge or the need to download and analyze the complete database. For this purpose, a unique search engine feature will soon be added to the analysis section of the site. The beta version of the site, including the full database, can already be accessed at http://iscdbstaging.wustl.edu/. After finalizing the Analysis Tab, the site will move to the Hebrew University’s servers.