Textkonventionen am Bundesverfassungsgericht auf der Spur

Beschreibung

Luisa Wendel examines the linguistic structure of around 10,000 decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court. With the help of computer-aided methods, she reveals conventions, developments and differences. Her findings provide new insights into the court's jurisprudence beyond individual decisions and contribute to digital legal linguistics.
The linguistic form of decisions of the German Federal Constitutional Court remains largely unexplored. In this dissertation, the author undertakes a systematic empirical analysis that combines close readings of individual texts with large-scale computational methods. The foundation is a corpus of around 3,400 rulings from the Official Digest and 6,900 additional decisions of the German Federal Constitutional Court. Special attention is given to text segments such as rubric, tenor, reasoning, statement of facts, admissibility, merits, and the so-called "standards section". These are annotated either automatically or manually and analysed with respect to their frequency, length, and linguistic properties. The findings show that the degree of conventionalisation varies according to type of decision, outcome, and judicial body, with official rulings being more standardised than chamber decisions. Norm control procedures, for example, produce longer and more complex structures. The study also identifies diachronic developments: texts become longer, more uniform, and more consistently organised, with introductory summary sentences increasingly established. Initial peculiarities-such as missing text segments or unusual subdivisions-disappear over time. By applying digital methods to constitutional jurisprudence, the work uncovers patterns invisible in single-case studies, confirming some scholarly intuitions while challenging others. It thereby opens new avenues for both linguistic and legal research and exemplifies the effective intersection of law and the digital humanities.

Autor*in

Luisa Wendel
Geboren 1988; Studium in Göttingen und Galway; 2013 Erste Juristische Prüfung und MagistraLegum Europae; Rechtsreferendariat am Kammergericht; 2016 Zweite Juristische Staatsprüfung; Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Lehrstuhl für Öffentliches Recht, insb. Verfassungsrecht, und Rechtsphilosophie der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; 2024 Promotion.

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