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

Nevelow Mart & Luftig on Curation of Legal Resources, and Digest and Citator Results in Wexis

Professor Susan Nevelow Mart of the University of Colorado Boulder School of Law, and Professor Dr. Jeffrey T. Luftig of the University of Colorado, Boulder, have posted the abstract of a new paper entitled The Case for Curation: The Relevance of Digest and Citator Results in Westlaw and Lexis.

Here is the abstract:

Humans and machines are both involved in the creation of legal research resources. For legal information retrieval systems, the human-curated finding aid is being overtaken by the computer algorithm. But human-curated finding aids still exist. One of them is the West Key Number system. The Key Number system’s headnote classification of case law, started back in the nineteenth century, was and is the creation of humans. The retrospective headnote classification of the cases in Lexis’s case databases, started in 1999, was created primarily although not exclusively with computer algorithms. So how do these two very different systems deal with a similar headnote from the same case, when they link the headnote to the digesting and citator functions in their respective databases? This paper continues an investigation into this question, looking at the relevance of results from digest and citator search run on matching headnotes in ninety important federal and state cases, to see how each performs. For digests, where the results are curated – where a human has made a judgment about the meaning of a case and placed it in a classification system – humans still have an advantage. For citators, where algorithm is battling algorithm to find relevant results, it is a matter of the better algorithm winning. But no one algorithm is doing a very good job of finding all the relevant results; the overlap between the two citator systems is not that large. The lesson for researchers: know how your legal research system was created, what involvement, if any, humans had in the curation of the system, and what a researcher can and cannot expect from the system you are using.

This paper was presented at AALL 2012: American Association of Law Libraries’ Annual Meeting, held 21-24 July 2012, in Boston Massachusetts, USA.

Nevelov Mart, A Study of West’s Headnotes and Key Numbers and LexisNexis’s Headnotes and Topics

Susan Nevelow Mart of the University of California Hastings College of Law has published The Relevance of Results Generated by Human Indexing and Computer Algorithms: A Study of West’s Headnotes and Key Numbers and LexisNexis’s Headnotes and Topics, 102 Law Library Journal No. 2, pages 221-249 (2010). Here is the abstract:

This article begins the investigation into the different ways results are generated in West’s “Custom Digest” and in LexisNexis’s “Search by Topic or Headnote” and by KeyCite and Shepard’s. The author took ten pairs of matching headnotes from important federal and California cases and reviewed the results sets generated by each classification and citator system for relevance. The differences in the results sets for classification systems and for citator systems raise interesting issues about the efficiency and comprehensiveness of any one system, and the need to adjust research strategies accordingly.

New on VoxPopuLII: Mokanov on the Canadian Vendor-Neutral Legal Citation Standard & the CanLII Citator

Canada’s pathbreaking vendor-neutral legal citation standard, and CanLII’s innovative RefLex citator, are the topics of Ivan Mokanov’s new post, entitled Environmentally-Friendly Citations, on the VoxPopuLII blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

Mr. Mokanov is Deputy Director of LexUM, the publisher of CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute.

Mr. Mokanov’s post describes the origins of the neutral standard, its benefits, its implementation by CanLII, and its widespread adoption. The post also discusses the development of and workflow for CanLII’s RefLex online citator.

Because the post discusses technical, policy, and user issues, the post should be of interest to legal information systems administrators and developers, policy advocates, legal information professionals, and all users of CanLII.