Ricerc@Sapienza

Tiresias, the Theban soothsayer who was blinded for revealing the secrets of the gods and met in the underworld by Odysseus, unlike the other specters keeps memories of the past and, thanks to this, can help the Greek hero find his way home.

With this research project, conducted in an interdisciplinary manner between legal scholars of different fields and data-scientists, we re developing a pilot project to provide judicial offices with the "memory" that is indispensable for a more efficient performance of their task, as well as to allow a more transparent knowledge of their guidelines by scholars, professionals and citizens.

In Italy, only a few judicial offices, and only at the top level, benefit from some form of publicly accessible categorization of all their decisions. Using traditional methods, the task would in fact be impossible for territorial courts, given the huge number of documents and information to be processed. The newly established "ufficio del processo" itself, which should (also) take care of this task, cannot realistically be expected to fill this structural gap without having an adequate tool at its disposal.

In collaboration with the business section of the Court of First Instance and the Court of Appeal of Rome we are creating an algorithmic system for the drafting of the summaries (“massime”) of all decisions issued by the two offices in the period from their establishment (September 2012) until 31 December 2021.

From a technical point of view, the project will use an advanced technology for the recognition of scanned text (Optical Character Recognition, OCR), in connection with refined data mining methods. The implementation of the research algorithm will constitute the maximum moment of integration between the different areas of competence (legal and data-science) involved in the project.

In conducting the research project, we are following an approach of empirical analysis of law (EAL). We are not pursuing ambitions of predictive justice based on automated or algorithmic systems, because of the correlated cultural and political impracticability.