overthelex/ua-case-outcome

Ukrainian Court Case Outcome (EDRSR)

A dataset of 14,452 Ukrainian court decisions spanning 2008-2026 from the Unified State Register of Court Decisions (EDRSR), with parsed sections, outcome labels, and temporal epoch annotations. Designed for case outcome prediction and temporal robustness evaluation in legal NLP.

Dataset Description

Each record contains:

• facts — the factual circumstances section of the decision (model input). Following LEXTREME methodology, only the facts section is provided rather than the full text.
• dispositive — the operative part of the decision (for label verification).
• outcome — one of 7 labels (see below).
• epoch — temporal period: pre_war, hybrid_war, or full_scale.
• Metadata: court code, judge name, case category, adjudication date, year, jurisdiction type.

Temporal Epochs

The dataset captures three distinct periods in Ukrainian judicial history, enabling cross-temporal generalization research:

Epoch	Years	Context	Records
pre_war	2008, 2010-2013	Peacetime, all courts operational	~3,000
hybrid_war	2014, 2018-2021	Crimea annexation, Donbas conflict (ATO/JFO), partial occupation	~5,000
full_scale	2022-2026	Full-scale invasion, martial law, mass military cases	~7,000

Key distribution shifts across epochs:

• 2014: Courts in Crimea and parts of Donetsk/Luhansk ceased operating under Ukrainian jurisdiction.
• 2022+: Surge in military criminal cases (AWOL, desertion, draft evasion); new Criminal Code articles (111-1 collaborationism, 111-2); martial law procedures.
• Case type mix: Criminal cases shift from property/drug offenses (pre-war) to military offenses (full-scale).

Outcome Labels

Label	Description
granted	Claim fully granted
guilty	Defendant found guilty (criminal/admin)
partial	Claim partially granted
closed	Proceedings terminated or defendant acquitted
denied	Claim denied
plea_deal	Plea agreement approved
other	Unclassified (mixed/procedural)

Jurisdiction Types

Balanced across all 5 Ukrainian jurisdiction types per epoch:

Code	Name	Typical outcomes
1	Civil	granted / denied / partial
2	Criminal	guilty / plea_deal / closed
3	Commercial	granted / denied / partial
4	Administrative	granted / denied / partial
5	Administrative offenses	guilty / closed

Source Data

All decisions sourced from the official EDRSR API. The registry contains 101M+ decisions from 832 courts across Ukraine (2006-present). Personal data is anonymized at the source.

Anonymization tokens: [PERSON], [ADDRESS], [NUMBER], [INFO] replace EDRSR placeholders.

Intended Use

• Case outcome prediction: Given facts, predict the outcome label.
• Temporal robustness evaluation: Train on one epoch, evaluate on another to measure distribution shift resilience.
• Legal NLP benchmarking: Evaluate multilingual models on Ukrainian legal text — a Cyrillic civil-law system underrepresented in benchmarks like LEXTREME.
• Conflict impact analysis: Study how armed conflict affects judicial outcomes and case distributions.

Limitations

• Outcome labels are extracted via rule-based regex matching (~5% remain as other).
• Facts section parsing relies on formatting conventions that vary across courts and time periods.
• acquitted outcomes are merged into closed due to extreme rarity (~0.1% in Ukrainian courts).
• Early years (2008-2010) may have lower text quality due to digitization.
• 2009 is excluded due to insufficient data (52K total records vs 1M+ for other years).

Citation

@dataset{ovcharov2026uacaseoutcome,
  title={Ukrainian Court Case Outcome Dataset (EDRSR)},
  author={Ovcharov, Volodymyr},
  year={2026},
  publisher={Hugging Face},
  url={https://huggingface.co/datasets/overthelex/ua-case-outcome}
}

License

CC-BY-4.0. Source data is published by the State Judicial Administration of Ukraine under open data principles (Law of Ukraine "On Access to Court Decisions").