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

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

Juriscraper: A New Tool for Scraping Court Websites

New announcement from CourtListener: “Juriscraper is a library …which allows your project to easily scrape court websites….”

Click here for the complete description of Juriscraper.

Click here for the CourtListener Website.

HT @courtlistener.

CourtListener: New RSS & Alert Service for U.S. Federal Appellate Courts

CourtListener is a recently developed current awareness service for decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court and Circuit Courts of Appeals. The service provides current awareness via RSS (scroll down) or email alerts.

CourtListener was developed by Michael Lissner as a Master’s thesis project at the University of California Berkeley School of Information.

According to Mr. Lissner’s thesis:

CourtListener.com [...] aims to [...] provid[e] a free and open source platform for the aggregation, organization, search and retrieval of legal documents. The aggregation of new court documents is completed by a daemon on a rolling basis, building a huge corpus, and providing the latest cases from the Federal Courts of Appeal within — on average — about fifteen minutes from the moment they are published on the court website. From there, the documents are quickly indexed, and RSS feeds and document listings are updated. Finally, at the close of each day and beginning of each week and month, alerts are emailed to registered users informing them about topics that they have identied as relevant.

Click here for CourtListener coverage information.

CourtListener is an example of the kind of innovative legal information systems that the Law.gov legal open government data project seeks to enable.

HT @evwayne, @joebeone & @binarybits.