Research of judges and courts traditionally centers on judgments, treating each judgment as a unit of observation. However, judgments often address multiple distinct and more or less unrelated issues. Studying judicial behavior on a judgment level therefore loses potentially important details and risks drawing false conclusions from the data. We present a method to assist researchers with splitting judgments by issues using a supervised machine learning classifier. Applying our approach to splitting judgments by the Court of Justice of the European Union into issues, we show that this approach is practically feasible and provides benefits for text-based analysis of judicial behavior.

On 19 December 2006 the Polish Constitutional Tribunal delivered an interesting ruling on the division of powers between national courts and the Court of Justice in the interpretation of EU law. The Tribunal declined jurisdiction to answer a question on the conformity of the Polish law on excise duty with Article 90 EC and ruled that the issue at stake was the interpretation of EC law, thus falling within the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice. At the same time, however, the Constitutional Tribunal reserved its jurisdiction to handle EU-related matters with constitutional implications. This development fits nicely into the growing list of the Tribunal's decisions touching upon important legal issues linked to Poland's membership in the European Union.

On 11 July 1996, the International Court of Justice, in its third Substantive decision and first Judgment in respect of the dispute brought before it by Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia or BH) against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Yugoslavia or FRY) under Article IX of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, dismissed all the preliminary objections that had been raised by Yugoslavia, as well as several additional bases of jurisdiction invoked by Bosnia. The Court also found that it had jurisdiction to adjudicate upon the dispute and that the application filed by Bosnia on 20 March 1993 was admissible. It thus positioned itself, over three years after the application had been filed, to resume the proceedings to consider the case on its merits, though still on an somewhat lcisurely schedule.