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PRIN 2018 “The Clarity of Legal Proceedings (AttiChiari): A Novel Database for Scholars and Citizens”

Proposal Description:

Obscure and sometimes unnecessarily convoluted legal documents hinder the efficiency of the legal process and undermine citizens’ trust in the judiciary. This issue has recently been addressed by a Working Group at the Ministry of Justice, of which J. Visconti (Principal Investigator of the project) is a member, and to whose work R. Gualdo (local unit coordinator) and F. Bambi have contributed. The AttiChiari project aims to create a new resource for effective drafting of legal documents, focusing on clarity, conciseness, and incisiveness, concentrating on a type of text largely unexplored, namely the pleadings.

Specific objectives:

(i) the collection, for the first time in Italy, of a database of pleadings, coming both from the Court of Cassation and from a set of geographically diversified Courts and Tribunals (Genoa, Lecce, Viterbo, Turin, Milan, Rome, Naples, Syracuse, Treviso);

(ii) qualitative study of the textual and stylistic characteristics and the rhetorical and argumentative structure of such texts, which have so far been inaccessible to research;

(iii) identification of a selection of particularly well-written and constructed texts, collected in a section of the database, available both to lawyers and judges as examples of good practices in clear and effective writing, and to citizens as aids for understanding texts addressed to them, but too often difficult to understand even for educated readers.

The project involves three universities and a group of scholars in the linguistic and legal fields:

University of Genoa (project lead unit): Prof. Jacqueline Visconti (Italian linguistics, Principal Investigator) Prof. Claudia Caffi (general linguistics)

University of Tuscia (local unit): Prof. Riccardo Gualdo (Italian linguistics, Coordinator) Prof. Federigo Bambi (Italian legal history, Accademia della Crusca / University of Florence)

University of Salento (local unit) Prof. Maria Vittoria Dell’Anna (Italian linguistics, Coordinator) Prof. Ilaria Pagni (civil procedural law, University of Florence)

Phases of Project Development over the Three-year Period 2019-2021:

  1. Data Collection and Preparation In this phase of the research, collaborations with President Antonio Mura, coordinator of the ministerial group and former deputy attorney general at the Court of Cassation, and with the current First President of the Court of Cassation, Dr. Giovanni Mammone, who is also a member of the ministerial group, will be fundamental. In the delicate operation of anonymizing and screening the material, assistance from a collaborator with specific skills is planned, for whom a six-month contract will be advertised. Synergy with the legal profession and the judiciary is a crucial element of success in this phase.
  2. Qualitative Data Analysis, distributed as follows in the three units: Genoa: textual analysis and study of how portions of legal documents evolve from primary texts (briefs, pleadings, etc.) to subsequent texts at different stages of litigation; analysis of stylistic and rhetorical structures. Lecce: morpho-syntactic and lexical analysis, particularly focusing on the language of judgments applying the textual analysis model proposed by Francesco Sabatini. Tuscia: analysis of legal writing – and rewriting – and study of simplification techniques from the writer’s perspective for maximum understandability by the recipients. In addition to qualitative results, the analysis will allow the selection of a series of well-constructed texts from a textual, stylistic, and rhetorical point of view, which will constitute a database of good practices, serving as input for the third phase of the project.
  3. Construction of the AttiChiari Corpus. Transposition of texts into digital format, markup, and data entry into a platform prepared for the project. For the training of operators who will digitize texts and work with XML-TEI markup, the consultancy of an expert in Digital Humanities and implementation of lexical databases will be sought, who will model data architectures, design and create the software, including the query engine. AttiChiari aims to be the first database of legal pleadings in Italian: a valuable tool for scholars wishing to delve into the language of lawyers and its reverberation in judgments, an unprecedented aid to the legal professions, advocacy, and judiciary, for training purposes.