Stylistic Structure in Historic Legal Text

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This will be the project page for Elijah Mayfield and William Y. Wang.

The Background

Slaves remained the largest source of wealth until 1840s. Judicial preferences and styles could generate variations in the security of slaves. In this project, we are interested in understanding the stylistic differences of judges among all pro-slavery, anti-slavery, and boundary states. We are also interested in investigating how the stylistic patterns from judges' opinions are different from the case summaries, and how they can inform judicial decisions.

The Dataset

We have collected a corpus of slave-related and property-related US supreme court legal opinions from Lexis Nexis. The dataset includes 6,014 slave-related state supreme court cases from 24 states, during the period of 1730 - 1866. It also includes 14,580 property-related cases from the same period. Most of the cases consist of the following data fields:Parties, Court, Date, Judge Opinion, Previous Court and Judges, Disposition, Case Overview, Procedural Posture, Outcome, Core Terms Generated by Lexis, Headnote, Counsel, and Judge(s).

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