Towards Classifying Parts of German Legal Writing Styles in German Legal Judgments

Stefanie Urchs, Jelena Mitrovic, Michael Granitzer

Abstract: The main tool of a lawyer is their language. Legal prose is bound by writing styles, especially in Germany. These styles ensure that, i.a. judgments are written in a structured and comprehensive way. The writing style used for German judgements is called Urteilsstil and consist of several subcomponents. These subcomponents should be classifiable with the help of argumentation mining techniques. However, this classification is currently not possible because an annotated corpus, that considers such special structure of German legal text, is not available. This paper explores possibilities for classifying two subcomponents of the Urteilsstil by utilising argumentation mining. Furthermore, the creation of a new corpus for legal classification is proposed.