Lissner and Carver on CourtListener: Where we are and where we’d like to go

Michael Lissner and Professor Dr. Brian Carver of University of California, Berkeley, have posted CourtListener: Where we are and where we’d like to go, at VoxPopuLII.

Here is an excerpt:

At CourtListener, we are making a free database of court opinions with the ultimate goal of providing the entire U.S. case-law corpus to the world for free and combining it with cutting-edge search and research tools. We–like most readers of this blog–believe that for justice to truly prevail, the law must be open and equally accessible to everybody.

It is astonishing to think that the entire U.S. case-law corpus is not currently available to the world at no cost. Many have started down this path and stopped, so we know we’ve set a high goal for a humble open source project. From time to time it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on where we are and where we’d like to go in the coming years. [...]

The post discusses the development and current technology of CourtListener, which includes email alerts of new cases, automatic identification and cross-linking of citations, a set of scrapers called Juriscraper for gathering court decisions from court Websites, and bulk access to court decisions in XML.

The post also describes future plans for development, which include:

adding oral argument audio, case briefs, and data from PACER. Adding these new types of information to CourtListener is a must if we want to be more useful for research purposes, but doing so is a long-term goal, given the complexity of doing them well.

We also plan to build an opinion classifier that could automatically, and without human intervention, determine the subsequent treatment of opinions. Done right, this would allow our users to know at a glance if the opinion they’re reading was subsequently followed, criticized, or overruled, making our system even more valuable to our users. [...] You can see our plans on our feature tracker, our bugs in our bug tracker, and can get in touch in our forum.

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @caminick

U.S. GPO releases House bills in bulk XML

Today the U.S. Government Printing Office has begun making U.S. House of Representatives’ legislative bills available for bulk download in XML, at http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLS

Currently, only bills from the current Congress are included.

The user guide provides more details about the data.

Click here for the GPO press release.

Click here for the Speaker’s office press release.

Release of the bills in bulk XML is a key goal of the #freeTHOMAS movement and a longstanding goal of the open government data community.

The House bills are the second major Congressional data set to be released in bulk XML this month; the first was the House floor proceedings in bulk XML.

Here are links to selected posts about the availability of this new legislative data set:

• Daniel Schuman: Access to Legislation Gets Better, Promise of More to Come
• Joshua Tauberer: On the new bulk bill XML from GPO
• Nick Judd: House Republicans Release More Data Catnip for Developers
• Alex Howard: Open data of U.S. House legislation now available in bulk format

Please see the comments to this post for links to additional resources about this issue.

Schuman: 30 Organizations Urge Congress to Improve Public Access to Legislative Information

Daniel Schuman of Sunlight Foundation has posted Improve Public Access to Legislative Information, on the Sunlight Foundation Blog.

Here is a summary of the post:

Today [i.e., 10 April 2012,] 30 organizations from across the political spectrum joined together to ask Congress to improve public access to legislative information. Our joint letters to congressional appropriators and rulemakers urges Congress to direct that the THOMAS legislative database be published online [in bulk] and to establish an advisory committee on further improvements.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Sunlight and Tauberer Lobby Congress to Provide Public Bulk Access to THOMAS Legislative Data

This week, the Sunlight Foundation and Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack announced that they would lobby Congress to provide free, public bulk access to the legislative data that is available through THOMAS .

Click here for the Sunlight Foundation post.

Click here for Dr. Tauberer’s post.

[CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that POPVOX and OpenCongress were participating in this lobbying effort. They are not. I regret the error.]