A Grammar of French Civil Cassation: A Ground-Level Dataset and Tool

Abstract

This paper presents a dataset of 121,536 ground-reasons pairs across 86,464 rulings of the five civil chambers of the French Court of Cassation (2016-2025). An appeal on points of law cannot itself be appealed and often decides a case for good. Understanding how the Court rules is thus crucial and can help lawyers who draft those appeals. Inside a ruling, every ground of appeal (a distinct legal complaint against the appealed decision) has its own answer from the Court. This answer is called the reasons and it belongs to one of a few doctrinal families. Using a deterministic pipeline, we pair each ground with its reasons and attach the pair to its family, according to the established French taxonomy. We obtain a descriptive grammar of civil cassation that shows which grounds succeed, which legal texts they refer to, and how both evolve over the decade. We release the dataset, the code and an interactive consultation tool.