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

Glassmeyer: Free Law Users Group

Sarah Glassmeyer, JD, MLS, of CALI has launched Free Law Users Group, on the pbworks platform.

Here is the description:

This group is for sharing news and developments in the Free Law world. Primarily it will serve as a conduit for connecting librarians to the law tech and developer communities, in the hope that librarians will be able to increase involvement and share their skills and knowledge. It is also hoped that individuals in the Free Law, Open Law and Open Gov developer worlds will join in and see that librarians aren’t so scary and can be a valuable resource in their projects.

This website is a wiki. Please feel free to add anything of relevance. It will really only succeed if the community takes charge of it. This also means it is a constant work in progress so check back often!

HT @sglassmeyer

On a related note:

Tim Stanley of Justia has started a new Free Law discussion group on Google+.

Justia launches a Free Law discussion group on Google+

Tim Stanley of Justia has started a new Free Law discussion group on Google+.

Recent topics have included Courtney Minick’s post about the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to begin self-publishing its opinions online.

Juricaf Wins Open Data Award

Juricaf, the free database of francophone supreme court decisions, has been awarded the i-expo 2012 Trophée Open data, according to a post by Jean Gasnault entitled Juricaf – trophée I-Expo 2012 catégorie Open Data, at Juriconnexion.

According to the conference Website:

Ce trophée récompense une initiative innovante de réutilisation de données publiques, innovante, provenant du secteur public, privé ou associatif.

For more information on Juricaf, please see the post, Relaunch of Juricaf: Database of Francophone Supreme Court Decisions.

Congratulations to Guillaume Adreani of AHJUCAF, developer of Juricaf.

HT @juriconnexion.