Ontario court of appeal and graph

Decoding the Ontario Court of Appeal

Appellate courts occupy a unique position. They are the final instance for most litigants guiding lower courts but they are also a gateway to the Supreme Court. This dual role calls for special scrutiny and analysis. Yet, data and analysis of appeal courts remains scarce especially compared to apex courts.

This project fills part of this gap relating to the Ontario Court of Appeal. It introduces a new dataset of Ontario Court of Appeal decisions between 2008-2021 consisting of both metadata, such as outcomes per decision, and the decision full text, which can be mined through natural language processing techniques.

Aside from presenting the dataset, the project uses novel data science approaches to trace the practice of the Court over time, to dissect the decision patterns of its judges, and to assess how the pandemic shock impacted the Court. It finds, amongst others, that the Court has been stable in its decision patterns, but that decisions have grown longer; it also shows that some judges render harsher decisions than others, and it illustrates how the pandemic created instant precedent. We hope that the new dataset and corpus will spur further research on the Ontario Court of Appeal.

article

Read the article

Alschner, Wolfgang, and Yazhi Zheng. “Court, Judges and the Pandemic: Computational Legal Insights from the Ontario Court of Appeal Corpus 2008-2021.” Western Journal of Legal Studies 15, no. 2 (July 9, 2024).

data

Access the data generated by the project

The Court of Appeal of Ontario (ONCA) is the highest court of the Canadian province of Ontario, Canada. To improve the empirical study of the Court, we web scraped and curated the published decisions of the ONCA rendered between 2008-2021. We used natural language processing (NLP) to extract targeted meta data such as the names of the judges rendering the decision, the outcome of the decision and the legal field of concern in the decision. An accompanying paper explains the methodology in greater detail and answers a preliminary set of research question. This dataset contains the full text of 12667 decisions of the ONCA between 2008-2021 and its accompanying meta data. It was extracted from the ONCA website in 2022. (2024-07-01)

Ontario Court of Appeal dashboard