Swiss Federal Supreme Court Dataset (SCD)
Authors/Creators
- 1. University of Zurich
- 2. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich
Description
The Swiss Federal Supreme Court Dataset (SCD) provides a record of all 118,443 cases decided by the Swiss Federal Supreme Court between 2007 and September 2023. The SCD includes 31 variables that document basic case information, the court composition, the area of law, information about the appealed judgment, the parties, the case outcome, and about citations and publication status.
The dataset can be used as data infrastructure for both qualitative and quantitative analysis of Federal Supreme Court jurisprudence. It is generated using a fully automated pipeline and will be updated quarterly until at least 2025 to include the latest judgments and possible expansions.
Technical info
The standard .csv export of the SCD does not include judgment texts due to file size and encoding limitations. Starting with version 2023-4, we are providing a supplementary .parquet (Apache Parquet) file which includes an additional text variable that contains the judgment texts as strings and is otherwise identical to the standard export, identified by the suffix -text in its file name.
For most researchers and all applications which do not require accessing the judgment texts, we recommend using the standard .csv export.
Notes
Detailed information and variable documentation can be found in the Codebook. You can contact us with any questions or comments. Find our contact information on our ORCID pages (see links above or in the Codebook).