The story
01More than a search screen
Case Law Explorer is a legal-data platform. Dutch (Rechtspraak), European Court of Human Rights (HUDOC) and EU (CELLAR) decisions come in through corpus-specific extraction paths and meet in one schema. Identity, access, product and operations are separate services, so several research tools can share the corpus without sharing one application.
02What I work on
The search interface, shared interface packages, the account service, scoped API access and rate limits, the modular split, Docker deployment and server operations, and parts of the extraction pipeline. The platform builds on earlier Case Law Explorer work and a wider research group; none of this implies sole authorship of the data or the research programme.
03Decisions that matter
- One shared case table keyed by ECLI, with a satellite table per court so each source keeps its own fields instead of being flattened.
- Search and full text cost different amounts, so full judgments load only when a reader asks for them.
- Identity is not entitlement. Signing in says who you are; a separate service decides which endpoints you may use, at what cost, under which limits, and records why.
- A citation graph that was cut short says so in the response, so a truncated network can’t be fed to a centrality measure as if it were complete.
04Why it is listed here
It runs on the institute’s infrastructure, not on my server, so it appears off the machine. The connection to the next item is direct: the centrality paper uses this corpus.