Introduction

This publication represents a release of the JURIS (Justice Department Retrieval and Inquiry System) data collection that has been made available to the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) by the U.S. Department of Justice. The time span of the text ranges from the 1700s to the early 1990s.

Data

There are 1,664 individual text files in the corpus, 1011 on the first CD-ROM and 653 on the second. The original archive consisted of 219 files ranging between less than 1 MB and nearly 70 MB in size. In order to make the data more accessible for research use, we chose to divide the larger files into pieces, such that the average file size was about 2 MB when uncompressed (the largest uncompressed file size is about 4.5 MB). Divisions of the files were done at document boundaries, so all files contain whole documents.

There are a total of 694,667 document units in the corpus and these can be categorized to some extent with regard to their content. The following is a partial list of categories and their descriptions drawn from JURIS documentation contained in the corpus. The terminology and organization of categories are those used in the JURIS documentation:

• Case Law
• Executive Order
• Regulations
• Federal Register
• Statutory Law
• Administrative Law
• International Agreements
• Freedom of Information Act and related documents
• Indian Law
• Tax Law
• Brief

Updates

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