Corpus of Contemporary English Legal Decisions, 1950–2021 (CoCELD)

CoCELD is a specialised corpus of legal decisions issued between 1950 and 2021. In the British Common Law system, judicial decisions, also known as legal decisions or law reports, make up Case Law. Decisions constitute a crucial type of document because they set legal precedents, interpret parliamentary law and complement statute law.

CoCELD contains case law produced within the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, more precisely samples of decisions issued in the Privy Council, the House of Lords and the United Kingdom Supreme Court. It is divided in two subcorpora, one for the Privy Council Decisions and another for the House of Lords and the Supreme Court Decisions, and into seven subperiods running from 1950 to 2021.

CoCELD is specifically designed to analyse recent changes in the language of judicial decisions which may have been triggered since the emergence of the Plain Language Movement in the 1970s, but it also enables researchers to investigate the language of judicial decisions synchronically and over the past few years.

Time of compilation: 2021–2022
Size: 733,227 words
Language: English
Number of texts/samples: 288
Period: 1950–2021
Released: 2022

Reference line and copyright

Rodríguez-Puente, Paula and David Hernández-Coalla. 2022. Corpus of Contemporary English Legal Decisions, 1950–2021 (CoCELD). Oviedo: University of Oviedo.

Manual

Information on structure, word counts and source texts is available for download.

Compilers

Paula Rodríguez-Puente and David Hernández-Coalla

Availability

Open access download under request to Paula Rodríguez-Puente (rodriguezppaula@uniovi.es). An open access folder hosted on the cloud can be accessed under the conditions laid down in the User Agreement.

Technical information

CoCELD is available in two formats: plain text and POS-annotated texts (CLAWS-7).

CoRD Entry submitted on January 23, 2022 by Paula Rodríguez-Puente.