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

New from Sunlight Labs: Scout: Alert Service for U.S. Legislation and Regulations

Eric Mill of Sunlight Labs has posted Scout, in Open Beta, on the Sunlight Labs Blog.

In this post, Mr. Mill describes Scout, a system for creating online notifications for U.S. federal and state legislation and U.S. federal regulations.

Here is a description of Scout’s features:

[...] Notifications via email, SMS, RSS, and JSON. [...]We also maintain feeds for any of your alerts so that you can plug them into whatever tools you already use to keep up to date on things.

Searching for keywords and phrases in bills, speeches, and regulations. When you search for a keyword on Scout, it searches through years of text from bills in Congress and the states, speeches given on the floor of Congress, and federal regulations from the entire executive branch. If you narrow your search to a specific set of information, you can add filters. [...]

Detailed activity on specific bills. If you find a particularly interesting bill (for example, the DATA Act), you can follow it to get a notification when it’s about to hit the floor, and when anything new happens to it. We also can notify you about any activity or votes on state bills. [...]

For more information, please see the complete post.

Email Alerts for Google Scholar Legal

Email alerts are now available for Google Scholar, including for court decisions, law journal articles, and patents accessible via Google Scholar, according to ResourceShelf, quoting Anurag Acharya of Google.

According to ResourceShelf:

1. For a “simple” alert, just run a Google Scholar search, click the search button, and get your results.

2. Click the “Envelope” icon (top left side of the page). Here, you can make changes, if needed, click “update” button and a sample of results using 2010 results with the modified search query appear below. When you’re set after deciding the amount you want returned, click “Create Alert.” You’re then taken to your page of “Google Scholar” Alert page. If you want to modify the alert at this point, you’ll need to click the cancel button and begin again.

The ResourceShelf post also provides instructions for creating alerts using Google Scholar’s advanced search syntax and the Google Scholar advanced search interface.

The ResourceShelf post further explains — quoting a post by Panos Ipeirotis on the blog A Computer Scientist In A Business School — how to create an alert for new citations to an article on Google Scholar:

1) Find the paper(s) you want an alert for in the Google Scholar database.

2) Included next to each result on a results page is the text “cited by xx.” Click that text. Now, simply click the envelope at the top of the page, decide on how many results you want (10 or 20) and your alert should be created.

For more information, please see the ResourceShelf post.

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.