Welcome at CAL²-Research Group

CAL² is the acronym for the interdisciplinary research group Computer Assisted Legal Linguistics. Members of CAL² are linguists, lawyers and computational (corpus) linguists who explore the fabric of language and law in Europe and the world. Since 2014 we have developed new big and multilingual reference corpora of legal texts (cf. JuReko) and tested computer supported methods as a basis for new perspectives on both micro and macro structures of legal meanings and dogmatics. We try to make the law more explicit.

Here you can find information about the:

• approach of Computer Assisted Legal Linguistics (CAL²),
• core team and co-operation partners,
• current core and associated projects,
• current events and activities,
• publications of the research group, and
• hyperlinks to related projects.

News

• Workshop: Sprachgebrauchsermittlung im Recht – Methoden & Perspektiven (11.04.2019)
  The workshop presents empirical studies in legal corpus linguistics. It takes place May 9th – 10th 2019, Academy of Sciences, Heidelberg, Germany and is organized by Friedemann Vogel, Tonio Walter, Hanjo Hamann
  » Read more (German only)

• First President Elected of the International Language and Law Association (09.09.2018)
  Together with the legal scholar, Frances Olsen (UCLA, US), CAL² co-founder Friedemann Vogel was elected as the first President of the International Language and Law Association (ILLA) during the relaunch conference in September 2018. The ILLA is the most important transnational network sharing information about important events or published papers regarding language and law.
   
• Manfred Fuchs Prize for CAL² researcher (11.6.2018)
  CAL² co-founder Hanjo Hamann was awarded the 2018 Manfred Fuchs Prize of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. The award, being the Academy's most highly endowed annual prize for young researchers, was just presented at the Academy's anniversary celebration in Heidelberg. It recognizes Hamann's "prior academic track record", being based mostly on his work in the CAL² research group.
  
  
• CAL² enters US research methodology (01.05.2018)
  At the BYU Corpus Linguistics Conference 2017 in Provo (Utah), CAL² investigators Hanjo Hamann and Friedemann Vogel were the only European researchers invited to present their work on language and law. Their conference contribution "Evidence-Based Jurisprudence Meets Legal Linguistics – Unlikely Blends Made in Germany" was just published in the BYU Law Review as an Open Access paper. It familiarizes American readers, for the first time, with the development and potential of legal (corpus) linguistics in Germany.
   
• CAL² Panel at the ILLA relaunch conference (18.05.2017)
  The panel "Corpus linguistics and hermeneutics in Legal Linguistics" will be chaired by Hanjo Hamann, in which we will present our recent project. The conference "Language and Law in a World of Media, Globalisation and Social Conflicts" takes place September 7^th – 9^th, 2017, University of Freiburg, Germany. For more information about the conference » Read more
  
  
• New project: CAL²Lab - An interdisciplinary research and experimenting platform for empirical analysis of the terminological systematics in the legal domain (03.05.2017)
  Starting next month, the follow-up project of JuReko ("legal reference corpus") is funded by the Academy of Sciences (Baden-Wuerttemberg) » Read more
  
  
• Interview about CAL² at the Legal Tech Blog (17.02.2016)
  The CAL² research group was recently featured by the Legal Tech Blog as a project "at the forefront of legal tech research in Germany." The interview with one of the founding members of CAL² highlights some core ideas of interdisciplinary research in Computer Assisted Legal Linguistics.
  
  
• Call for papers: The fabric of language and law. Discovering Patterns Through Legal Corpus Linguistics – 18th-19th March 2016, Heidelberg (14.08.2015)
  - Contributors for a peer-reviewed journal issue on the same topic submitted extended abstracts with 800–1000 words before 31st December 2015. » Read more
  - First draft of the conference programme is online  » Read more
  - The registration form for guest participants is online  » Read more
  
  
• Application for developing an international research group of computer assisted legal linguistics is successful (09.06.2015)
  The government of Baden-Wuerttemberg and the University of Freiburg support the development of CAL² as an international research group with 50.000 Euros.
   
  
• Application for developing a legal reference corpus successful (16.04.2014)
  The Academy of Sciences (Baden-Wuerttemberg) supports the development of the first legal reference corpus ("Juristisches Referenzkorpus", JuReko) with 180.000 Euros.