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.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: The zones of a ruling (left, adapted from Civ. 3, 2019, no. 18-12.682) and the pipeline that reads them (right). Only the badged zones are extracted. Highlighted: the matched visa and family marker.
Doctrinal family
Description
Typical wording
Violation of the law
A legal text was applied or interpreted incorrectly.
« la cour d’appel a violé le texte susvisé » [the court of appeal violated the above-cited text]
Lack of legal basis
The factual findings are incomplete, so the Court cannot check that the law was correctly applied.
« sans rechercher si …, la cour d’appel a privé sa décision de base légale » [without investigating whether …, the court deprived its decision of legal basis]
Distortion
The court misread a clear and precise document: it betrayed its plain meaning.
« en dénaturant les termes clairs et précis de … » [by distorting the clear and precise terms of …]
Defect of reasons
The reasoning is absent, contradictory, doubtful or fails to answer a party’s submissions.
« sans répondre aux conclusions …, la cour d’appel n’a pas satisfait aux exigences du texte susvisé » [without answering the submissions …, the court did not meet the requirements of the above-cited text]
Excess of power
The court overstepped its jurisdiction or its office.
« la cour d’appel a excédé ses pouvoirs » [the court of appeal exceeded its powers]
Breach of procedure
A procedural rule was violated, most often the adversarial principle.
« violation du principe de la contradiction » [violation of the adversarial principle]
Table 1: The doctrinal families of cassation.
Rejection family
Description
Typical wording
Summary rejection
The Court just declares that the ground cannot lead to cassation, and does not say why.
« pas lieu de statuer par une décision spécialement motivée » [no specially reasoned decision needed]
On the merits
The reasons discuss the ground’s legal substance and find it wanting.
« le moyen n’est pas fondé » [the ground is ill-founded]
Inadmissibility and inoperativeness (one family, following Boré)
Inadmissible: the ground cannot even be examined, for instance because it is raised for the first time before the Court.
« le moyen est irrecevable » [the ground is inadmissible]
Inoperative: the ground may be right, yet cannot change the outcome. It attacks a block of reasons the decision did not rely on.
« le moyen est inopérant » [the ground is inoperative]
Table 2: The rejection families.
Status
Meaning
Pairs
Share
Rejected
the ground fails
84,460
69.5%
Accepted
the ground succeeds, cassation
32,613
26.8%
No-match
no signal found
2,735
2.3%
Consequential
cassation by consequence
907
0.7%
Out-of-scope
not a ground on the merits
666
0.5%
Conflict
contradictory signals
155
0.1%
Table 3: The six outcome statuses and their distribution over the final corpus.
Table 5
Sample
Corpus (reweighted)
Outcome ( n )
Reading
κ [ 95% CI]
Agreement
κ [ 95% CI]
Agreement
Accepted ( 200 )
single-label
0.957 [ 0.922 – 0.987 ]
96.5%
0.961 [ 0.917 – 0.993 ]
97.5%
Rejected ( 200 )
exact sets
0.932 [ 0.889 – 0.972 ]
95.0%
0.929 [ 0.876 – 0.973 ]
95.9%
Table 6: Double annotation of the doctrinal families.
Figure 2: How appeals on points of law resolve, by chamber (2016–2025).
Table 8
Figure 3: Yearly shares, 2016–2025: the cassation side (left) and the rejection side (right). 2025 is incomplete.
Text
Citations
Accepted
In visa
Art. 1134 Civil Code, former numbering (binding force of contracts)
1,576
90.1%
90.2%
Art. L. 1154-1 Labour Code (proof of workplace harassment)
324
46.0%
46.9%
Art. L. 411-3 COJ (cassation without referral)
2,281
95.2%
3.1%
Table 9: Three article profiles from the article layer.