Abstract

The following reflections on the relationship between quantity and quality in the process of interpretation and knowledge in the sciences are based on an encounter between very different and yet related disciplines: Within the framework of the project “Legal Reference Corpus” (JuReko), which has been funded by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2014, we are testing the possibilities and limits of “computer-assisted legal linguistics”. To this end, we are building a reference corpus of German-language law, i.e. a processed collection of legal texts from particularly relevant domains (legislation, case law, jurisprudence) and various fields of law (civil, criminal, administrative, commercial law, etc.) as a basis for semi-automatic studies from a legal, linguistic and social science perspective. The corpus now comprises several hundred thousand fully digitized law, decision and jurisprudential essay texts, which have been stored in a standardized XML format, automatically marked up and enriched with metadata in a database. By building up this database, the project aims to use computer-assisted, quantifying analyses to test hypotheses that have emerged from previous qualitative research, as well as to develop new hypotheses about the linguistic-social constitution of the rule of law based on inductive data. This interest in knowledge can be made fruitful for the practice in court, in legislation and legal theory