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

Schuman on the Delay in Publishing the Current Version of the U.S. Constitution Annotated

Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation has posted After 578 Days, Where’s the Constitution Annotated? on the Sunlight Foundation Blog.

In this post Mr. Schuman decries the unexplained 14-month delay in making the current version of The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation (also known as The Constitution Annotated or CONAN) — Congress’s official treatise on U.S. constitutional law — publicly available on the Web, free of charge, in XML.

A PDF version of The Constitution Annotated is published on the U.S. Government Printing Office’s FDsys Website, but this version is disfavored because (a) the PDF format is unsuited to information reuse, and (b) the FDsys version is very difficult to process because it consists of a 2002 base volume plus four supplements, each of which must be consulted separately. By contrast, the “master version” of The Constitution Annotated is in XML format, and is said to be current and integrated in a single edition without supplements.

In his post Mr. Schuman offers numerous reasons — including reducing Congressional printing costs, increasing the public’s knowledge of U.S. constitutional law, and fostering innovation — for publishing The Constitution Annotated in XML on the free Web. Mr. Schuman refers to additional arguments expressed in a 2010 letter signed by more than 20 organizations advocating free Web access in XML to The Constitution Annotated.

For more information, please see the Sunlight Foundation’s earlier posts on this issue.

Schuman: Two Steps Forward on Improving Public Access to Legislative Information

Daniel Schuman of Sunlight Foundation has posted Two Steps Forward on Improving Public Access to Legislative Information, on the Sunlight Foundation Blog.

In this post, Mr. Schuman discusses two pieces of evidence suggesting that Congress may eventually provide free public access in bulk to congressional legislative data in XML — specifically, the data underlying the THOMAS legislative information system.

The first piece of evidence is a comment from a member of Congress that such bulk access will be discussed at length in a forthcoming report from the House Appropriations Committee Legislative Branch Subcommittee.

The second is a newly released, 2008 memorandum from the Library of Congress Congressional Relations Office, describing a plan “to make the underlying raw THOMAS data available to the public in XML.”

Mr. Schuman comments:

What’s notable is how the Library of Congress was technologically positioned to deliver on legislative data transparency four years ago, but apparently did not move forward. At a minimum, it should alleviate concerns about the difficulty of technological implementation.

Mr. Schuman further notes that the memo discusses the question of “who owns the data” in THOMAS. He writes:

The memo raises one major policy implication concerning who owns the data, contemplating that it belongs to the House, Senate, Congressional Research Service, and Government Printing Office. In the literal sense, that’s backwards: the information is owned by the American people and held in trust by Congress and its legislative agencies. These entities do serve as repositories of the information, however, and deserve consideration as to the technological means by which it is made available. However, that’s with the understanding that these entities should strive to meet the public’s need for the information and expansively follow the policies set by Congress in favor of transparency.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Proposal for Scaling Back Law.gov

A proposal for a scaled-back version of the Law.gov legal open government data initiative has been posted by Kent McKeever, Director of the Columbia University Law School Library.

Professor McKeever proposes mandating end-user access to primary legal materials of the U.S. federal government — on the model of U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO)’s Federal Register on GPO Access, but not requiring the U.S. federal government to provide access to those materials in bulk XML free of charge. Further, he proposes refraining from requiring state governments to provide access to primary law, and urges instead the development of “a program … to guide and help the individual states achieve the same level of publication.” Professor McKeever’s proposal does not appear to mention local governments.

I agree with many aspects of Professor McKeever’s vision for Law.gov at the federal level, but I disagree with the view that Law.gov should be scaled back. In particular, I disagree with Professor McKeever’s arguments respecting bulk XML access, and respecting whether Law.gov should seek to require state and local governments to provide free public access to legal materials.

Respecting bulk XML access, I offer three points. First, Professor McKeever’s proposal does not appear to mention the needs of scholarly researchers for access to large sets of legal information in machine readable formats, which needs have been expressed at previous Law.gov workshops (see, e.g., here and here).

Second, Professor McKeever’s proposal does not appear to consider whether government entities that engage in XML-based publishing — such as GPO — would incur substantial additional cost by providing the same XML files with which they generate legal materials for individual end-users, in bulk to the public free of charge, as GPO in fact now does respecting the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations, and as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office does respecting patent and trademark records.

Third, Professor McKeever’s proposal does not consider how bulk access to primary legal materials in XML spurs innovation in egovernment technology that can benefit citizens. For example, GPO’s decision to provide bulk access to the Federal Register in XML, free of charge, enabled research institutions to create innovative prototype erulemaking systems — including the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy‘s FedThread, the Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative‘s Regulation Room, and WestEd‘s GovPulse. The purpose of these projects is to develop technology to facilitate citizens’ participation in the creation of law and policy. Such technology is intended to benefit end-users — i.e., citizens — not “information re-packagers.”

Respecting whether the Law.gov project should seek to require state and local governments to provide free public access to their primary legal materials, I would argue that it should, because:

• Since U.S. citizens are subject to a great number of state and local laws, lack of ready access to those laws prevents citizens from fully participating in society, and imposes significant unnecessary costs on citizens for engaging in a range of socially beneficial commercial and non-commercial activities; and
• Research conducted in connection with the Law.gov project (see, e.g., here and here) has shown that state and local laws are frequently subject to copyright restrictions, and omitting those laws from the Law.gov project would mean losing a valuable opportunity to educate the public and policy makers about those restrictions, and to challenge those restrictions.

Click here for more information about the Law.gov legal open government data project.