The availability of structured legal data is important for advancing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for the German legal system. One of the most widely used datasets, Open Legal Data, provides a large-scale collection of German court decisions. While the metadata in this raw dataset is consistently structured, the decision texts themselves are inconsistently formatted and often lack clearly marked sections. Reliable separation of these sections is important not only for rhetorical role classification but also for downstream tasks such as retrieval and citation analysis. In this work, we introduce a cleaned and sectioned dataset of 251,038 German court decisions derived from the official Open Legal Data dataset. We systematically separated three important sections in German court decisions, namely Tenor (operative part of the decision), Tatbestand (facts of the case), and Entscheidungsgründe (judicial reasoning), which are often inconsistently represented in the original dataset. To ensure the reliability of our extraction process, we used Cochran’s formula with a 95% confidence level and a 5% margin of error to draw a statistically representative random sample of 384 cases, and manually verified that all three sections were correctly identified. We also extracted the Rechtsmittelbelehrung (appeal notice) as a separate field, since it is a procedural instruction and not part of the decision itself. The resulting corpus is publicly available in the JSONL format, making it an accessible resource for further research on the German legal system.

MOTIVATION: Ancestral character state reconstruction describes a set of techniques for estimating phenotypic or genetic features of species or related individuals that are the predecessors of those present today. Such reconstructions can reach into the distant past and can provide insights into the history of a population or a set of species when fossil data are not available, or they can be used to test evolutionary hypotheses, e.g. on the co-evolution of traits. Typical methods for ancestral character state reconstruction of continuous characters consider the phylogeny of the underlying data and estimate the ancestral process along the branches of the tree. They usually assume a Brownian motion model of character evolution or extensions thereof, requiring specific assumptions on the rate of phenotypic evolution. RESULTS: We suggest using ridge regression to infer rates for each branch of the tree and the ancestral values at each inner node. We performed extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of this method and have shown that the accuracy of its reconstructed ancestral values is competitive to reconstructions using other state-of-the-art software. Using a hierarchical clustering of gene mutation profiles from an ovarian cancer dataset, we demonstrate the use of the method as a feature selection tool. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The algorithm described here is implemented in C++ as a stand-alone program, and the source code is freely available at http://algbio.cs.uni-duesseldorf.de/software/RidgeRace.tar.gz. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.