scd-bubbles is an open source web app that visualises the decisions of the Swiss Federal Court 🇨🇭🏛. Every judgments is represented by a bubble, with the properties of the bubbles reflecting information about the case 🫧. It was created at the Open Legal Lab 2024 and is provided without any warranty. Source code is licensed under GPL-3.0.
Bubbles appear in chronological order of the decision date, and their color indicates the case outcome. Bubble size represents the length of the judgment text. Bubble positioning reflects the area of law: Civil law judgments appear in the left third of the screen, public law in the middle, and criminal law on the right. Judgments that were published as leading cases are identified with a golden border. On hover, the judgment identifier appears, and by clicking, the judgment will be displayed on the bger.li website. The half moon icon 🌗 toggles dark mode.
scd-bubbles is a fun way to gain an understanding of the caseload that the Swiss Federal Court is dealing with and conveys in a very broad sense information about the decisions taken in a (dis-)aggregated from. It is also suitable for meditative practices.
The data used is based on the Swiss Federal Supreme Court Dataset (F. Geering and J. Merane, "Swiss Federal Supreme Court Dataset (SCD)". Zenodo, 2023–2024. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.10634296). Using the data_preparation.R script, the dataset is pre-processed for visualisation and converted to JSON, while reducing the file size by eliminating unneeded variables.
The resulting bubbles.json data has the following structure:
{"docref":"1B_8/2007","date":"2007-02-28","size":13874,"colour":"r","leading_case":false,"app_represented":true,"area_general":"s","duration":3989}
docref is a string that contains the judgment identifier.
date is a date in YYYY-MM-DD format that contains the decision date of the judgment in the format YYYY-MM-DD.
size is an integer that contains the length of the judgment text in characters.
colour is a single character representing the judgment outcome: g = granted, p = partly granted, r = rejected, i = inadmissible, w = writeoff.
leading_case is a boolean that indicates if the judgment was published as leading case.
app_represented is a boolean that indicates if the appellant was represented by a lawyer.
area_general is a single character representing the area of law: s = strafrecht, o = oeffentliches recht, p = privatrecht.
duration is an integer between 0 and 8948, representing the log of the duration of proceedings, multiplied by 1000.