A French team publishes a "grammar" of civil cassation (2016-2025) which shows what means come to pass, what texts they invoke and how it evolves.
An appeal to the Court of Cassation cannot itself be appealed and often decides a case definitively: understanding how the Court rules is therefore valuable for the lawyers who draft these appeals. Avrile Floro, Tamara Dhorasoo, Nils Holzenberger, Thomas Le Goff, Tiphaine Viard and Maria Boritchev analysed 86,464 judgments handed down between 2016 and 2025 by the five civil chambers of the Court of Cassation.
Associate each grievance with its response
In a judgment, each plea — a separate legal reproach addressed to the impugned decision — receives its own response from the Court, which falls into a few major doctrinal families. Rather than resorting to a generative model, the authors designed a deterministic processing chain that matches each plea to its motivation and places it in the corresponding family, according to the taxonomy established in French law. They obtain 121,536 pairs.
The result is a kind of descriptive grammar of civil cassation: it indicates which means are successful, which texts they refer to, and how these trends have changed over the decade. The dataset, the code, and an interactive consultation tool are published in open access.
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