Recent advances in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning provide us with the tools to build predictive models that can be used to unveil patterns driving judicial decisions. This can be useful, for both lawyers and judges, as an assisting tool to rapidly identify cases and extract patterns which lead to certain decisions. This paper presents the first systematic study on predicting the outcome of cases tried by the European Court of Human Rights based solely on textual content. We formulate a binary classification task where the input of our classifiers is the textual content extracted from a case and the target output is the actual judgment as to whether there has been a violation of an article of the convention of human rights. Textual information is represented using contiguous word sequences, i.e.

An artificial intelligence method developed by University College London computer scientists and associates has predicted the judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) with 79% accuracy, according to a paper published Monday, Oct. 24 in PeerJ Computer Science. The method is the first to predict the outcomes of a major international court by automatically analyzing case text using a machine-learning algorithm.* "We don't see AI replacing judges or lawyers," said Nikolaos Aletras, who led the study at UCL Computer Science, "but we think they'd find it useful for rapidly identifying patterns in cases that lead to certain outcomes. It could also be a valuable tool for highlighting which cases are most likely to be violations of the European Convention on Human Rights." In developing the method, the team found that judgments by the ECtHR are highly correlated to non-legal (real-world) facts, rather than direct legal arguments, suggesting that judges of the Court are, in the jargon of legal theory, "realists" rather than "formalists."