Images from left to right: Hanne Salonen / Finnish Parliament, Hannu Häkkinen / The Finnish Heritage Agency, Lauri Putkonen / Helsinki City Museum

What is LAWPOL?

The LAWPOL project gathers political and legal documents related to public decision-making and builds a research infrastructure including several digital tools for the research of law and politics..

Utilizing the existing Lakitutka.fiweb application (Lawradar) and FINPARL corpus,the new LAWPOL portal covers the entire decision-making process, from political programs to court decisions. The research infrastructure is being developed by the University of Turku Faculty of Law, the Centre for Parliamentary Studies, and the Åbo Akademi Institute for Human Rights, each contributing their own expertise.

LAWPOL encompasses key legal materials for the legislative process.This includes documents produced by legislators, stakeholders, and experts, EU legislation, as well as national and international case law.

The political dimension of legislation is also included.For instance, parliamentary debates, government programs, election and party manifestos reflect the political dynamics, ideologies, interests, and conflicts related to decision-making. Previously fragmented across various sources, these materials will now be consolidated under one portal.

The new digital tools provided by LAWPOL promote interdisciplinary research, transparency, and openness in political decision-making and legislation. Above all, the user-friendly interface enables the examination of large datasets without requiring in-depth knowledge of computational methods. Read more about the project...