The proposal aims at a comparative legal-historical study of access filters at the Supreme Courts in European and American jurisdictions. After studying the roles these courts were meant to fulfil according to their mainly 19th century origins, their changing roles in modern societies will be focused on within the context of the various mechanisms and theories on access to the supreme court. These mechanisms and theories will be evaluated from the perspective of a society under the rule of law. The research project not only aims at increasing academic knowledge but also at providing recommendations for reform projects

Court decisions are commonly studied in legal education by means of manually reading, interpreting and comparing cases. In legal academia and legal practice, computational techniques have emerged that assist scholars and practitioners in analysing court decisions. This development is non-existent, barely visible at best, in legal education in the Netherlands. Consequently, students (current and future) are not provided with the 21st-century skills they need to enter the (legal) labour market. In addition, technology has the potential to change the learning process, giving a different perspective on learning materials with insights that cannot be obtained using traditional human analyses. In order to close the gap, this project proposes to develop software that analyses and visualizes how court decisions relate and evolve over time, providing students with an opportunity to navigate through the body of case law, to identify clusters of decisions and to find patterns that remain unknown when applying traditional methodologies. Building on a prototype that was developed for research purposes, an educational software platform will be built that can be integrated into existing legal courses. It will provide a vehicle for teaching students how to work with algorithms for analysing legal cases. It will also accelerate their learning process by empowering them to identify relevant cases themselves (using the technology) rather than relying purely on the opinion of their teachers to prescribe lists of relevant case law. In short, this programme contributes to updating legal education in the Netherlands to "Society 2.0" and educate 21st-century T-shaped lawyers.