Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Department of Social Sciences - Berlin Graduate School of Social Science

Cohort

BGSS Generation 2021

Title

Using Novel Quantitative Methods in Legal Science: Making Use of the Czech Apex Courts Dataset

Supervisor

Prof. Silvia von Steinsdorff

Recent Publications

Paulík, Štěpán. "The Rule of Law Framework and its Effectiveness." Časopis pro právní vědu a praxi 29.1 (2021): 7-25.

Institution

Law and Society Institute Berlin, Humboldt Universität

Activities

Academically, Štěpán has recently as a result of his enrollment at the Humboldt Universität taken up quantitative methods, R programming, including natural language processing and machine learning. Štěpán has webscraped and built a comprehensive dataset on the Czech apex courts. They intend to apply the machine learning models and quantitative text analysis to study the behaviour of judges, focusing on the circumstances under which judges dissent, how they reveal their political stance and what are the collegial effects in various panels. In their effort, Štěpán is motivated by good practice of data analysis and tidy data storage. Apart from his academic career, Štěpán is an avid climber, both indoor as well as outdoor climbing.