  Why does an argument end up in the final court decision? Was it deliberated
or questioned during the oral hearings? Was there something in the hearings
that triggered a particular judge to write a dissenting opinion? Despite the
availability of the final judgments of the European Court of Human Rights
(ECHR), none of these legal research questions can currently be answered as the
ECHR's multilingual oral hearings are not transcribed, structured, or
speaker-attributed. We address this fundamental gap by presenting LaCour!, the
first corpus of textual oral arguments of the ECHR, consisting of 154 full
hearings (2.1 million tokens from over 267 hours of video footage) in English,
French, and other court languages, each linked to the corresponding final
judgment documents. In addition to the transcribed and partially manually
corrected text from the video, we provide sentence-level timestamps and
manually annotated role and language labels. We also showcase LaCour! in a set
of preliminary experiments that explore the interplay between questions and
dissenting opinions. Apart from the use cases in legal NLP, we hope that law
students or other interested parties will also use LaCour! as a learning
resource, as it is freely available in various formats at
https://huggingface.co/datasets/TrustHLT/LaCour.

Computation and Language