Introducing HUNCOURT: A New Open Legal Database Covering the Decisions of the Hungarian Constitutional Court for Between 1990 and 2021

Abstract

This article presents HUNCOURT, a complex open legal database for the quantitative analysis of the practice of the Hungarian Constitutional Court (HCC). Covering all HCC decisions and orders published between 1990 and 2021, the new database is published under an Open Database License and allows for advanced queries that go beyond the search engine options of industry-standard proprietary legal databases. We bypass the often inaccurate and time-consuming manual search options by providing a full text database that is entirely machine-readable, along with a full selection of available metadata. In the article, we also demonstrate the potential of the new database for scholarly research by presenting a use case for such analysis related to the self-reflexivity and reasoning of the constitutional court. We show that a state-of-the-art database opens up possibilities for applying quantitative text analysis and text mining to research questions that have so far been mostly analysed in a qualitative framework.