Developing High-Quality Data Infrastructure for Legal Analytics: Introducing the Israeli Supreme Court Database

Driving discovery in the study of law and legal institutions often requires infrastructure in the form of databases and other tools. The challenge is how to build the infrastructure. For obvious reasons, transplanting coding rules and variables from one dataset to the next is perilous; specialized knowledge of local conditions is necessary before one piece of datum is collected. Also required is adherence to a universal set of principles that distinguish high-quality infrastructure; namely, that the tool is capable of addressing real-world problems, accessible, reproducible and reliable, sustainable and updatable, and foundational. These principles guided construction of the Israeli Supreme Court Database, new and original infrastructure encoding information from all panel cases opened between 2010 and 2018 in the Israeli Supreme Court.