Mill on Scout, Free Access to Law, and Open Legal Data

Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation has posted the text of his presentation on tracking government information and open legal data, given 26 April 2013 at the AzALL Congressional Information Symposium, in Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

Here is the introduction to the presentation:

I recently got a chance to go speak to a group of Arizona law librarians about legal informatics [...]

They found me because of Scout, and asked me to talk about tracking government information. I decided to start with Scout as an example, to zoom out to similar projects [GovTrack and CourtListener] , and then to describe the conditions necessary to make projects like ours possible. Because the audience was law librarians, a sympathetic crowd inside an unsympathetic area of government, I emphasized the necessity of absolutely free access to data as a fundamental requirement and right. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @konklone

Jaquith launches Open Virginia data portal, providing access to legal data

Waldo Jaquith today launched Open Virginia, an open data platform for the U.S. state of Virginia.

Open Virginia is built with the CKAN open source data portal software.

Here is a description of Open Virginia:

Open Virginia is an effort to document the open government data published about the Commonwealth of Virginia—APIs, bulk downloads, and links to third-party data sources that provide much-needed information about how our government works.

Open Virginia currently offers access to legal data, including:

• the state’s legislative code
• code sections affected by bills 2006-
• a list of Virginia Court of Appeals decisions that cite a given law
• data on members of the state legislature

HT @shevski

CanLII launches API

Colin Lachance of the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) tells us that CanLII, which provides free access to Canadian law, has opened an application programming interface (API).

A description appears below.

Colin has a new post at Slaw.ca that provides context for the API launch: Unbundling legal information.

Description of CanLII API:

This document describes the specifications of the CanLII API. The API provides over a million court judgments, tens of thousands of statutes and regulations and covers all the major courts and legislatures, as well as over 150 specialized courts and tribunals.

How it works

Let’s dig into the more technical information:

- The technical guidelines provide details about encoding, formats, error management and content negotiation.
- The technical guideline will give you detailed information on how to develop your client and interact with the API.

Supported Resources:

Currently, the API supports following services:

Legislation browse: Regulations and statutes from all Canadian federal, provincial and territorial jurisdictions,
Case browse: Judgments from all courts and tribunals accessible on CanLII.

On top of the complete documentation, you can also access directly to the content of the API thanks to the I/O Docs module. [...]

For the API key and for other details, please see the description.

HT @sglassmeyer

Aaron Swartz Memorial Grants to further development of RECAP open law repository

On 3 February 2013 an additional $10,000 for the Aaron Swartz Memorial Grants — which fund the development of the RECAP project aimed at increasing public access to U.S. federal judicial information — were announced by Stephen Schultze of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Here is an excerpt from the announcement:

The generous folks over at Google’s Open Source Programs team have pledged to support two more RECAP-related project awards — at $5,000 each. These are open to anyone who wishes to submit a proposal for a significant improvement to the RECAP system. We will work with the proposers to scope the project and define what qualifies for the award.

There are several potential ideas. For instance, someone might propose add support to RECAP for displaying the user’s current balance and prompting the user to liberate up to their free quarterly $15 allocation as the end of the quarter approaches (inspired by Operation Asymptote). Someone might propose to improve the archive.recapthelaw.org interface, and to improve detection and removal of private information. Someone might propose some other idea that we haven’t thought of. You may wish to watch the discussion of a few of these initial ideas from our developer kickoff session.

Email info@recapthelaw.org if you are interested. Thanks again to the Think Computer Foundation and Google.

These grants are in addition to the original $5,000 in grants sponsored by Think Computer Foundation and the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, where RECAP was developed.

Click here for Stephen Schultze’s VoxPopuLII post explaining RECAP.

HT @harlanyu and @sjschultze

Adreani: Retour d’expérience sur Juricaf

Guillaume Adreani of AHJUCAF has published Retour d’expérience sur Juricaf, la base de données de jurisprudence francophone, Revue générale du droit, January 2013.

The post describes the technology and functionality of Juricaf, the free and open database of francophone supreme court decisions, with particular emphasis on its use of open source software — including Apache Solr and CouchDB — its exposure of metadata in several formats including Dublin Core, its use of schema.org microdata, and the compatibility of its metadata with the Zotero open source citation management system.

Here are excerpts from the introduction:

Juricaf est une base de données de décisions de justice en français accessible gratuitement à l’adresse . Créée à l’initiative de l’AHJUCAF, l’association des cours de cassation francophones et réalisée par le Laboratoire Normologie, linguistique et informatique du Droit de l’Université de Paris I, elle publie à ce jour près de 800 000 documents issus de 42 pays et institutions francophones. Elle bénéficie également du soutien de l’Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. [...]

Quels sont les facteurs-clés pour la réussite d’un tel projet ?
Le moteur de recherche est au cœur d’un tel outil. Ses performances sont liées à l’utilisation d’outils en Open source. Trois autres critères sont déterminants pour que le projet soit crédible :

• Une alimentation en décisions de justice et une mise à jour automatisée,
• L’ajout d’innovations documentaires,
• Une exposition maximale des métadonnées. [...]

For more details, please see the complete article.

HT @adreagui

Access to U.S. Federal Court Decisions on FDsys Expanded to Permit All Federal Courts to Participate

Access to U.S. federal court decisions on the Government Printing Office (GPO)’s FDsys platform has been expanded to allow any federal court to choose to have its decisions made available on FDsys, according to a 31 January 2013 announcement by the Judicial Conference of the U.S.

Here is the text of the announcement:

A pilot project giving the public free, text-searchable, online-access to court opinions now is available to all federal appellate, district and bankruptcy courts.

The Judicial Conference, the policy-making body of the Federal court system, approved national implementation of the project with the Government Printing Office, Federal Digital System (FDsys), which provides free access to publications from all three branches of federal government via the Internet. The pilot project pulls opinions nightly from courts’ Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) systems and sends them to the GPO, where they are processed and posted on the FDsys website. The functionality to transfer opinions to FDsys is included in the latest release of CM/ECF which is now available to all courts. Twenty-nine courts participated in the original pilot, and now, all courts may opt to participate in the program.

Access to judicial opinions through FDsys allows the Judiciary to make its work more easily available to the public. Collections are divided into appellate, district or bankruptcy court opinions and are text-searchable across opinions and across courts. FDsys also permits embedded animation and audio.

Presently, more than 600,000 opinions dating back to 2004 are available. Opinions from the pilot are already one of the most heavily used collections on FDsys, with millions of retrievals each month.

Benefits of access to these decisions on FDsys include that GPO authenticates the PDF version of each decision, GPO creates a descriptive metadata record for each decision in the interoperable MODS format, and developers can harvest decisions and metadata from a single site.

HT @EJWalters

Robinson on the Indian Supreme Court’s workload, data management, and publishing practices

Nick Robinson, JD, of the Centre for Policy Research, has posted a working paper entitled The Indian Supreme Court by the Numbers (2012).

Here is the abstract:

This working paper, which uses internal Indian Supreme Court data provided by the Court itself, examines the Indian Supreme Court’s docket in detail from 1993 to 2011. It also occasionally draws on available data to describe the workings of the Court before 1993. The paper points out how deficiencies in the way data is currently collected and categorized by the Court presents challenges in developing a full picture of its workload. Using the admittedly imperfect data set, it then analyzes the Supreme Court’s caseload by geographic region of appeal, subject-matter category, and petition type, as well as looks at trends in the overall workload of the Court.

The paper also discusses the Court’s publishing practices, and refers to Dr. Sushant Sinha‘s Indian Kanoon free-access-to-law service, among other resources.

Hinkle et al.: Theory & Empirical Analysis of Strategic Word Choice in District Court Opinions

Rachael K. Hinkle, JD, and Professor Dr. Andrew D. Martin, both of Washington University Department of Political Science, and colleagues, have published A Positive Theory and Empirical Analysis of Strategic Word Choice in District Court Opinions, Journal of Legal Analysis, 4(2), 402-444 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

Supported by numerous empirical studies on judicial hierarchies and panel effects, Positive Political Theory (PPT) suggests that judges engage in strategic use of opinion content—to further the policy outcomes preferred by the decision-making court. In this study, we employ linguistic theory to study the strategic use of opinion content at a granular level—investigating whether the specific word choices judges make in their opinions is consistent with the competitive institutional story of PPT regarding judicial hierarchies. In particular, we examine the judges’ pragmatic use of the linguistic operations known as “hedging”—language serving to enlarge the truth set for a particular proposition, rendering it less definite and therefore less assailable—and “intensifying”—language restricting the possible truth-value of a proposition and making a statement more susceptible to falsification. Our principal hypothesis is that district court judges not ideologically aligned with the majority of the overseeing circuit judges use more hedging language in their legal reasoning in order to insulate these rulings from reversal. We test the theory empirically by analyzing constitutional criminal procedure, racial and sexual discrimination, and environmental opinions in the federal district courts from 1998 to 2001. Our results demonstrate a statistically significant increase in the use of certain types of language as the ideological distance between a district court judge and the overseeing circuit court judges increases.

Ninth Circuit Begins In-house Publishing of Its Decisions, with Summaries Written by Court Staff

The U.S. federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has issued a press release entitled Court Moves to In-House Publishing of Opinions.

The press release reads in part:

[...] Since early November, the court has been processing opinions in-house rather than contracting for that service from West Publishing. The change is expected to produce a substantial cost savings for the court.

Court staff now manage the process of converting opinions from the original word processing documents into Adobe PDF files, which are then uploaded onto the website, where they can be viewed and/or downloaded by the public. The opinions are formatted for optimal viewing on a tablet computing device. On a regular desktop or laptop computer screen, opinion text will initially appear oversized but can easily be redisplayed in normal size using the options available in the Adobe Reader software.

A more important change involves the addition of case summaries prepared by court staff. The summaries save time by allowing readers to quickly get the gist of a decision without having to search through the opinion itself. West previously produced the summaries, but for copyright reasons they could not be included with opinions made available online. [...]

For more information please see the complete press release.

HT Gary Price at InfoDocket and Tim Hull at Courthouse News

Masters on CourtCloud: A New Repository for Court Opinions

Elmer Masters of CALI introduced a new technology called CourtCloud today in a presentation at LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference.

Here is a description of CourtCloud from the service’s Website:

• CourtCloud is a repository for court opinions.
• Only the court can upload documents to CourtCloud.
• Save word processor files in the desktop CourtCloud folder.
• Saved word processor files are copied to the CourtCloud server.
• CourtCloud processes the document creating PDF, HTML, and XML versions.
• The files are stored in the court’s CourtCloud folder.
• Original file + PDF, HTML, XML versions are available on the desktop and archived on the server.
• There is no direct public access to CourtCloud.
• Opinions saved to CourtCloud are added to the Free Law Reporter
• Free Law Reporter provides powerful searching and public API for access.

Click here for Twitter tweets about the presentation.