openlegaldata/legal-citation-graph-germany

Open Legal Data: Citation Graph Germany

This dataset contains the citation graph extracted from German court decisions and laws indexed by the Open Legal Data Platform. Each row is a single citation edge from a source (case or law) to a target (case or law), with the slugs needed to join back to the `court-decisions-germany` dataset.

Available dumps

Data format

Each sample has the following columns:

• —from_type — `Case or Law` (source side)
• —from_slug — slug of the citing object
• —from_law_book_slug — book slug when `from_type == "Law"`; empty otherwise
• —from_case_* — court / file number / date / etc. when `from_type == "Case"`
• —to_type — `Case or Law` (target side)
• —to_slug — slug of the cited object
• —to_law_book_slug, to_law_book_code, to_law_section, to_law_title — populated for Law targets
• —to_case_court_* — populated for Case targets

Numerical IDs are intentionally omitted — slugs are sufficient and stable across snapshot dates.

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Citation

If you use this data, please cite our research paper:

@inproceedings{10.1145/3383583.3398616,
author = {Ostendorff, Malte and Blume, Till and Ostendorff, Saskia},
title = {Towards an Open Platform for Legal Information},
year = {2020},
isbn = {9781450375856},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3383583.3398616},
doi = {10.1145/3383583.3398616},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in 2020},
pages = {385–388},
numpages = {4},
keywords = {open data, open source, legal information system, legal data},
location = {Virtual Event, China},
series = {JCDL '20}
}

License

In Germany, acts, statutory instruments, official decrees and official notices, as well as decisions (including court decisions) and official head notes of decisions do not enjoy copyright protection (UrhG § 5).

The collection and metadata has the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0.