LaCour!: Enabling Research on Argumentation in Hearings of the European Court of Human Rights

What can we learn about law and legal argumentation from court judgments alone? Contemporary research addresses empirical legal questions (e.g., which arguments are used) or legal NLP questions (e.g., predicting case outcomes) by relying on the availability of the final'products' of each case, the court decisions (Habernal et al, 2023; Medvedeva et al, 2020). The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is a prominent data source, as its decisions are freely available in a large amount, along with the metadata of the violated articles and other attributes. This makes ECHR a popular choice among NLP researchers (Aletras et al, 2016; Chalkidis et al, 2020). However, whether or not the legal arguments in ECHR's cases are created as a part of legal deliberation or are created post-hoc after reaching a decision remains an open (and partly controversial) question. In order to better understand the legal argument mechanics, that is which arguments of the parties were presented, discussed, or questioned, and thus might have influenced the case outcome, we must take the oral hearings into account. We witness that the availability of oral hearing transcripts of the U.S. Supreme Court enables further legal research (Ashley et al, 2007). However, empirical research into the interplay of arguments at the court hearings and the final judgments has been so far impossible for the ECHR, as there are no hearing transcripts available.