# Egypt's Judgement Corpus: A Taxonomy

> We categorized the records classified as judgements in our Egypt sources by legal domain and outcome, and found nearly half of them aren't court rulings at all.

**Type:** Empirical Report | **Track:** Corpus Taxonomy | **Jurisdictions:** EG | **Date:** August 2026 | **Author:** Dike Research Team | **Read time:** 8 min read

## Abstract

We audited every record in Egypt's corpus classified as a judgement, no LLM involved, to see what that classification actually contains. It's not what the name suggests: 46.4% of those records are fatwa/advisory opinions from the State Council's advisory board, identifiable because their own citation reads فتوى رقم ("fatwa number") rather than a case number. The remainder splits across 19 legal-domain tags, dominated by Administrative (46.4%) and Criminal (15.5%) matters, with a real but partial overlap between the administrative tag and the fatwa opinions. We're publishing the full breakdown, including the messy parts, so anyone relying on this corpus knows what's actually in it.

## Key Stats

- **Fatwa/Advisory Share:** 46.4%
- **Administrative Domain Share:** 46.4%
- **Legal Domains Tracked:** 19
- **Valid-Dated Coverage:** 96.6%

## 1. What the judgement classification actually contains

"Judgement" implies a court ruling. In this corpus, the judgement classification is a broader bucket: it also holds fatwa opinions issued by the State Council's advisory board (الجمعية العمومية لقسم الفتوى والتشريع), a body that answers legal questions referred to it by government agencies rather than adjudicating disputes between parties. Both are stored under the same classification, but they're procedurally different documents. We detected the fatwa subset directly from each record's own citation text, which for these records literally reads فتوى رقم N لسنة Y instead of a case or appeal number, so this isn't an inference, it's what the source document says about itself.

> **Methodology** (finding): All numbers in this report come from direct structured queries against Dike's corpus for Egypt (legal domain, outcome, citation year, word count, and page count), filtered to the judgement classification. No LLM classification or summarization was used to produce these figures. Every count is a verified query result, and we cross-checked before publishing wherever two figures looked suspiciously close (see the Administrative/fatwa overlap in section 3).

## 2. Legal domain breakdown

The legal-domain tag carries 19 distinct values across the judgement corpus, with a long tail: the top 7 domains account for 96.1% of all records. The table below shows every domain with more than 500 records; the remaining 7 domains (قضاء, زراعي, إرث, صحة, رياضي, قانوني) total 21 records combined.

| Domain (Arabic) | English | Count | Share |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| إداري | Administrative | 266,132 | 46.4% |
| جنائية | Criminal | 88,734 | 15.5% |
| أخرى | Other / uncategorized | 69,002 | 12.0% |
| تجاري | Commercial | 44,174 | 7.7% |
| مدني | Civil | 38,500 | 6.7% |
| عقود | Contracts | 23,627 | 4.1% |
| تأمين اجتماعي | Social Insurance | 21,253 | 3.7% |
| خدمة مدنية | Civil Service | 7,934 | 1.4% |
| إصلاح زراعي | Agrarian Reform | 2,469 | 0.4% |
| عمالي | Labor | 1,526 | 0.3% |
| أحوال شخصية | Personal Status | 1,464 | 0.3% |
| ملكية | Property | 509 | 0.1% |

## 3. The administrative / fatwa overlap

266,132 records are tagged إداري (Administrative) and 266,064 are fatwa-cited. Those totals are close enough that we checked whether they were actually the same set before reporting them separately, and they're not: cross-referencing the two shows 157,610 records satisfy both conditions, meaning 59.2% of administrative-tagged records are fatwa opinions, and 59.2% of fatwa opinions happen to carry the administrative tag. That symmetry is a coincidence of the two totals being close, not evidence of a stronger relationship. In practice, the Administrative domain tag returns a mix of actual administrative-court rulings and State Council advisory opinions, and the two shouldn't be treated as interchangeable evidence of contested administrative litigation.

## 4. Ruling outcomes

The outcome tag captures the disposition of each judgement (for court rulings) or the advisory conclusion (for fatawa). It's freer-form than the legal-domain tag, with 20+ distinct values, but the top 8 account for 82.7% of the corpus.

| Ruling (Arabic) | English (approx.) | Count | Share |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| عدم أحقية | Not entitled / claim denied | 176,343 | 30.7% |
| أحقية | Entitled / claim granted | 127,900 | 22.3% |
| عدم قبول | Inadmissible | 71,910 | 12.5% |
| آخر | Other | 48,156 | 8.4% |
| نقض | Cassation (reversed) | 41,219 | 7.2% |
| غير محدد | Unspecified | 38,999 | 6.8% |
| اختصاص | Jurisdictional referral/decline | 23,555 | 4.1% |
| رفض | Rejected | 5,895 | 1.0% |
| إلغاء | Annulled | 3,249 | 0.6% |
| براءة | Acquittal | 798 | 0.1% |

## 5. Temporal distribution

Coverage skews heavily toward the most recently ingested decades, which likely reflects digitization priority more than a real change in litigation volume. Counts below use each record's citation year, filtered to a plausible 1850-2026 range (96.6% of records; the remaining 0.4% carry OCR-corrupted year values and are excluded).

| Period | Records |
| --- | --- |
| Before 1950 | 5,193 |
| 1950s | 4,173 |
| 1960s | 12,442 |
| 1970s | 17,413 |
| 1980s | 9,227 |
| 1990s | 16,207 |
| 2000s | 83,450 |
| 2010s | 301,487 |
| 2020s (through 2026) | 104,124 |

## 6. Depth by domain

Average length correlates loosely with procedural complexity: Personal Status and Agrarian Reform rulings run long, while high-volume Labor and Civil matters tend to be short, formulaic dispositions.

| Domain | Records | Avg. Words | Avg. Pages |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| أحوال شخصية (Personal Status) | 1,464 | 2,417 | 7.6 |
| إصلاح زراعي (Agrarian Reform) | 2,469 | 1,559 | 5.2 |
| خدمة مدنية (Civil Service) | 7,934 | 1,278 | 4.0 |
| جنائية (Criminal) | 88,734 | 1,276 | 4.8 |
| إداري (Administrative) | 266,132 | 1,104 | 3.9 |
| ملكية (Property) | 509 | 953 | 3.7 |
| أخرى (Other) | 69,002 | 879 | 3.7 |
| تأمين اجتماعي (Social Insurance) | 21,253 | 876 | 3.5 |
| عقود (Contracts) | 23,627 | 783 | 3.3 |
| تجاري (Commercial) | 44,174 | 764 | 3.2 |
| مدني (Civil) | 38,500 | 517 | 2.6 |
| عمالي (Labor) | 1,526 | 336 | 2.2 |

## Citation

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