This volume brings together a range of approaches to quantitative legal scholarship and connects them with distinctly legal forms of explanation and justification. Its central premise is that large bodies of empirical data can be made accessible for legal inquiry when empirical methods and legal research questions are aligned with one another. A common point of departure is the research project Leibniz Linguistic Research into Constitutional Law and the corpus of Federal Constitutional Court decisions developed within that project.
Methodologically, the volume combines approaches from corpus linguistics, citation analysis, set-theoretic comparative methods, and legal argument mining, while also reflecting on their methodological and jurisprudential foundations. Quantitative approaches can help legal scholars analyse large datasets, particularly the ever-growing number of judicial decisions. They make it possible to scrutinise assumptions that often remain implicit in conventional legal research and stimulate reflection on the very concepts and objects of legal inquiry. Through a series of case studies, the contributions demonstrate the conditions under which empirical data can be operationalised in a legally meaningful way. They model alternative explanatory pathways for judicial decisions, identify patterns of legal reasoning, and characterise courts' self-citation practices. At the same time, they show how and where quantitative findings depend on legal background knowledge and qualitative interpretation and cannot, on their own, support normative conclusions. The volume brings together diverse approaches, opportunities, and limitations involved in extending legal scholarship through quantitative methods. In doing so, it provides a common foundation for the reflective integration of quantitative methodologies into legal research.