Processing of personal data in Court Proceedings: A model for linguistic and legal studies

Although Court proceedings, in particular counsel documents, are an important resource for linguistic and legal studies, they have not been systematically analysed so far, as the presence of personal data makes their collection difficult and their dissemination impossible. Traditional anonymisation methods affect the readability of the documents and hinder the possibility of linguistic analysis: erasing anthroponyms, toponyms, dates and any other personal data makes it impossible to identify and distinguish the different parties involved in the proceedings and to reconstruct the reported facts. Readable and complete texts are instead crucial for both linguistic and legal studies, which aim at fully analysing the strategies used by lawyers in referring to the assisted party, to the counterpart and to third parties involved in the trial; these questions become even more relevant when analysing, from an intertextual perspective, several documents related to the same judgement. This paper aims at presenting the model of semi-automatic processing of personal data developed by the PRIN 2017 AttiChiari/ClarAct, showing how it can be useful for linguistic and legal studies on Court proceedings (or other legal texts), also for dissemination purposes.