7 ms·

Three hundred and sixty years of United States caselaw

187 points by crunchiebones 8y ago

lennylemony 8y ago
Here's the release! https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2018/10/29/caselaw-access-project-cap-launches-api-and-bulk-data-service/ https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2018/10/29/caselaw-access-p...
scabbycakes 8y ago
Mnn 360 years of United States coleslaw.
- GavinMcG 8y ago
  This sort of comment isn't really in the spirit of this forum.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  "Coleslaw" is an anglicization of the Dutch "koolsla" or cabbage salad. Its existence in the US would likely date back to the first Dutch colony in North America: New Netherland, which was first settled in the 1620s. As such, American coleslaw has a history of roughly 390 years and antedates American caselaw by a few decades.
  - JackC 8y ago
    You got me curious -- our first case with the modern term "coleslaw" is from 1935, in Rhode Island, and begins ominously with "The plaintiff in this case was injured by swallowing two small pieces of wire concealed in an order of beef stew, bread and coleslaw which she had purchased and was eating at defendant’s lunch counter." https://api.case.law/v1/cases/?search=coleslaw&full_case=true https://api.case.law/v1/cases/?search=coleslaw&full_case=tru... Apologies that the link requires a login to view the full text, and for various other shortcomings in the current browsing experience. Also apologies to anyone who actually reads the coleslaw case -- caselaw is a scary place.
    - stephengillie 8y ago
      Coleslaw caselaw could go on Bob Loblaw's law blog.
  - King-Aaron 8y ago
    This is the comment I came to this thread hoping to see.
- rexreed 8y ago
  As irrelevant as this comment is, this is EXACTLY what my mind thought about the subject line too. If you hadn't posted it, I might have. Power on!
riffic 8y ago
"Case Law" has a specific meaning for those of us who are not versed in the jargon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_law
mchannon 8y ago
Needs a simple JavaScript or similar client (REPL?) baked into the page. API appears powerful, but lots of free alternatives that don’t require a comfort level with shell scripting or REST calls.
- zekevermillion 8y ago
  I'm not aware of a free alternative for all US published caselaw. Could you cite?
  - mchannon 8y ago
    google.com/scholar I also really like casemine.com. I have no idea how incomplete those archives are but I doubt they’re missing much I’d be looking for.
    - zekevermillion 8y ago
      Well, google scholar certainly does not have all published opinions, far from it. It is not an adequate research tool, just a starting point. I'm not familiar with casemine, will check it out. EDIT: casemine appears to be neither free, nor to have all published US decisions as far as I can tell.
- chefandy 8y ago
  Project dev here. We’re hoping to have something simple available within a week or two. If you’re just looking for a nice case browsing interface, in the interim, you should check out Ravel’s site.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
politician 8y ago
"The agreement with our project partner, Ravel, requires us to limit access to the full text of cases to no more than 500 cases per person, per day. This limitation does not apply to researchers who agree to certain restrictions on use and redistribution. Nor does this restriction apply to cases issued in jurisdictions that make their newly issued cases freely available online in an authoritative, citable, machine-readable format. We call these whitelisted jurisdictions. Currently, Illinois and Arkansas are the only whitelisted jurisdictions." TLDR: 500 cases per day, but looks like you can buy access from Ravel [1]. https://home.ravellaw.com/ https://home.ravellaw.com/
- chefandy 8y ago
  Yep— Ravel will absolutely negotiate commercial licenses. No later than 2024, the entire corpus will be available for free for all use cases, including commercial.
jaytaylor 8y ago
Is caselaw data an artifact originating from the public dollars which funded the whole show to begin with? Why isn't this data available for free to any American Citizen who pays taxes? In the form of a torrent, the distribution cost is negligible. A reasonable duplication fee seemed reasonable back when replicating vast amounts of information involved massive amounts of paper and toner. But today.. I don't understand. I'm curious enough to have asked this same question on Quora [0]. YMMV. [0] https://www.quora.com/unanswered/How-can-LexisNexis-own-the-data-originating-from-the-publicly-funded-legal-system https://www.quora.com/unanswered/How-can-LexisNexis-own-the-...
- codingdave 8y ago
  It is available. Go to any law school library, look on the shelves. But that doesn't mean that private entities who via their own labor, digitize it, are required to give your their resulting digital datasets. All the more reason to be thankful that these folk are doing exactly that, and giving us tools to get at the data.
- JackC 8y ago
  Caselaw data is public domain, but it's very expensive to digitize -- partly because it's mostly stored on paper, and partly because it's mixed together with copyrighted material. For this project we had to scan 40,000 volumes of caselaw. We used a high speed scanner at the Harvard Law Library, and went through about 40 million pages at a rate of 500,000 pages a week over a couple of years. The pages then had to be redacted of copyrighted material like headnotes inserted by private publishers, since courts typically don't publish the cases themselves, and those redactions had to be checked by humans. That work was funded by a startup, Ravel, which is why we ended up with temporary limits on commercial use of the data. No later than March 2024, however, it will all be fully available for bulk download by anyone in the world. If necessary we'll set up a torrent. :) (Hopefully earlier! For any state that starts officially publishing its caselaw in digital form, we can immediately release their caselaw back to the beginning, as we have already for Illinois and Arkansas.)
  - extortionist 8y ago
bpchaps 8y ago
If the creators are listening in - do you have any plans to include the text of the court docs as well?
- JackC 8y ago
  The full text of the cases is available. For example, here is a query for the full text of Illinois cases, which are available without a login: https://api.case.law/v1/cases/?jurisdiction=ill&full_case=true&page_size=1 https://api.case.law/v1/cases/?jurisdiction=ill&full_case=tr... Full text for cases other than Illinois and Arkansas is limited to 500 cases per person per day, which is why we don't include it in API results by default.
  - bpchaps 8y ago
    Gotcha! I've been looking for something like this for a while now. Thanks for making it!
JackC 8y ago
Hi! I'm a developer on this project. Happy to answer questions for the next hour or so, and I'll check back tomorrow as well. This is a first public release and the Harvard Library Innovation Lab is a small team, so please look at the site as just the beginning! In particular we're starting by targeting developers with an API and bulk data downloads. More user friendly features like a front-end browser, PDF scans, ngram browser, etc. are on the roadmap, but we're hoping other developers will step in and build some great tools as well.
- RNCTX 8y ago
  I'm assuming that as a university library team you're familiar with the Blacklight ecosystem of library search tools? I and a single Rails dev modified the current Blacklight codebase to handle PDFs (and other office docs) with minimal effort a few months ago, I think doing so when you get to PDF handling and a web UI would be a completely valid starting point. I'll save you the trouble of figuring out which is the only existing feasible open source library to sift through hundreds of thousands of PDF pages... QPDF is it.
  - JackC 8y ago
    Thanks for this suggestion! We'll definitely kick Blacklight around as an option. We have a complex data model (cases, opinions, parties, citations, courts, jurisdictions, volumes ...), and tens of millions of pages, and weird access restrictions, and multiple output formats (text/html/xml/pdf), so whatever we end up with will have to be pretty custom.
    - spiralx 8y ago
      I worked for the British Medical Journal a while ago which had 120 years of articles digitised, along with several different medical databases, with around a dozen different applications utilising this content in various ways. It was basically all stored internally as XML using the Documentum/xDB CMS/XML database stack, with lots of XSLT used to generate content for different apps and in different formats. Not at all the easiest system to work with, but it does allow you to handle a lot of structured data such that you need the minimum amount of customisation possible - which is still a lot!
dandare 8y ago
I always wondered if any of the cases directly contradict each other.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Can you elaborate on the notion of US case law, before the US existed? I don't mean this to be snarky, I assume this was intentional. Is this referring to cases prior to the US's founding, that the US then adopted as relevant legal precedent?
- xxpor 8y ago
  The US inherited the common law of England.
- xxpor 8y ago
  The US inherited the common law of England. There's usually something more relevant now, but you'll still sometimes see citations of old English cases or the Magna Carta.
- JackC 8y ago
  Good question! This refers to caselaw from courts that predate the United States, such as Maryland and Massachusetts: https://api.case.law/v1/cases/ https://api.case.law/v1/cases/ State courts didn't come into existence with the US Constitution -- the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, for example, dates back to 1692, and those precedents are still "good" in some sense though unlikely to be cited. We don't have English precedents, unfortunately, as guessed by some sibling comments.
bulldog13 8y ago
Do you have or know of, anything like this for federal courts (bankruptcy, district, appellate, supreme) ?
- rezlieg 8y ago
  project member here ... this site includes access to federal cases, e.g. https://api.case.law/v1/cases/?cite=&name_abbreviation=&jurisdiction=us&reporter=&decision_date_min=1900-01-01&decision_date_max=2000-12-31&docket_number=&court=&search=&full_case=&body_format= https://api.case.law/v1/cases/?cite=&name_abbreviation=&juri...
saltvedt 8y ago
The Norwegian equivalent of this project, got sued for copyright infringement of supreme court verdicts: http://www.wiumlie.no/2018/rettspraksis/10-22-returns http://www.wiumlie.no/2018/rettspraksis/10-22-returns
emmelaich 8y ago
Consider github. German and French law is already there. https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze https://github.com/steeve/france.code-civil https://github.com/steeve/france.code-civil

187 points by crunchiebones 8y ago

Here's the release! https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2018/10/29/caselaw-access-project-cap-launches-api-and-bulk-data-service/ https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2018/10/29/caselaw-access-p...

scabbycakes 8y ago

Mnn 360 years of United States coleslaw.

GavinMcG 8y ago
This sort of comment isn't really in the spirit of this forum.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
"Coleslaw" is an anglicization of the Dutch "koolsla" or cabbage salad. Its existence in the US would likely date back to the first Dutch colony in North America: New Netherland, which was first settled in the 1620s. As such, American coleslaw has a history of roughly 390 years and antedates American caselaw by a few decades.
- JackC 8y ago
  You got me curious -- our first case with the modern term "coleslaw" is from 1935, in Rhode Island, and begins ominously with "The plaintiff in this case was injured by swallowing two small pieces of wire concealed in an order of beef stew, bread and coleslaw which she had purchased and was eating at defendant’s lunch counter." https://api.case.law/v1/cases/?search=coleslaw&full_case=true https://api.case.law/v1/cases/?search=coleslaw&full_case=tru... Apologies that the link requires a login to view the full text, and for various other shortcomings in the current browsing experience. Also apologies to anyone who actually reads the coleslaw case -- caselaw is a scary place.
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    Coleslaw caselaw could go on Bob Loblaw's law blog.
- King-Aaron 8y ago
  This is the comment I came to this thread hoping to see.
rexreed 8y ago
As irrelevant as this comment is, this is EXACTLY what my mind thought about the subject line too. If you hadn't posted it, I might have. Power on!

riffic 8y ago

"Case Law" has a specific meaning for those of us who are not versed in the jargon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_law

mchannon 8y ago

Needs a simple JavaScript or similar client (REPL?) baked into the page. API appears powerful, but lots of free alternatives that don’t require a comfort level with shell scripting or REST calls.

zekevermillion 8y ago
I'm not aware of a free alternative for all US published caselaw. Could you cite?
- mchannon 8y ago
  google.com/scholar I also really like casemine.com. I have no idea how incomplete those archives are but I doubt they’re missing much I’d be looking for.
  - zekevermillion 8y ago
    Well, google scholar certainly does not have all published opinions, far from it. It is not an adequate research tool, just a starting point. I'm not familiar with casemine, will check it out. EDIT: casemine appears to be neither free, nor to have all published US decisions as far as I can tell.
chefandy 8y ago
Project dev here. We’re hoping to have something simple available within a week or two. If you’re just looking for a nice case browsing interface, in the interim, you should check out Ravel’s site.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

politician 8y ago

"The agreement with our project partner, Ravel, requires us to limit access to the full text of cases to no more than 500 cases per person, per day. This limitation does not apply to researchers who agree to certain restrictions on use and redistribution. Nor does this restriction apply to cases issued in jurisdictions that make their newly issued cases freely available online in an authoritative, citable, machine-readable format. We call these whitelisted jurisdictions. Currently, Illinois and Arkansas are the only whitelisted jurisdictions." TLDR: 500 cases per day, but looks like you can buy access from Ravel [1]. https://home.ravellaw.com/ https://home.ravellaw.com/

chefandy 8y ago
Yep— Ravel will absolutely negotiate commercial licenses. No later than 2024, the entire corpus will be available for free for all use cases, including commercial.

jaytaylor 8y ago

Is caselaw data an artifact originating from the public dollars which funded the whole show to begin with? Why isn't this data available for free to any American Citizen who pays taxes? In the form of a torrent, the distribution cost is negligible. A reasonable duplication fee seemed reasonable back when replicating vast amounts of information involved massive amounts of paper and toner. But today.. I don't understand. I'm curious enough to have asked this same question on Quora [0]. YMMV. [0] https://www.quora.com/unanswered/How-can-LexisNexis-own-the-data-originating-from-the-publicly-funded-legal-system https://www.quora.com/unanswered/How-can-LexisNexis-own-the-...

codingdave 8y ago
It is available. Go to any law school library, look on the shelves. But that doesn't mean that private entities who via their own labor, digitize it, are required to give your their resulting digital datasets. All the more reason to be thankful that these folk are doing exactly that, and giving us tools to get at the data.
JackC 8y ago
Caselaw data is public domain, but it's very expensive to digitize -- partly because it's mostly stored on paper, and partly because it's mixed together with copyrighted material. For this project we had to scan 40,000 volumes of caselaw. We used a high speed scanner at the Harvard Law Library, and went through about 40 million pages at a rate of 500,000 pages a week over a couple of years. The pages then had to be redacted of copyrighted material like headnotes inserted by private publishers, since courts typically don't publish the cases themselves, and those redactions had to be checked by humans. That work was funded by a startup, Ravel, which is why we ended up with temporary limits on commercial use of the data. No later than March 2024, however, it will all be fully available for bulk download by anyone in the world. If necessary we'll set up a torrent. :) (Hopefully earlier! For any state that starts officially publishing its caselaw in digital form, we can immediately release their caselaw back to the beginning, as we have already for Illinois and Arkansas.)
- extortionist 8y ago

bpchaps 8y ago

If the creators are listening in - do you have any plans to include the text of the court docs as well?

JackC 8y ago
The full text of the cases is available. For example, here is a query for the full text of Illinois cases, which are available without a login: https://api.case.law/v1/cases/?jurisdiction=ill&full_case=true&page_size=1 https://api.case.law/v1/cases/?jurisdiction=ill&full_case=tr... Full text for cases other than Illinois and Arkansas is limited to 500 cases per person per day, which is why we don't include it in API results by default.
- bpchaps 8y ago
  Gotcha! I've been looking for something like this for a while now. Thanks for making it!

JackC 8y ago

Hi! I'm a developer on this project. Happy to answer questions for the next hour or so, and I'll check back tomorrow as well. This is a first public release and the Harvard Library Innovation Lab is a small team, so please look at the site as just the beginning! In particular we're starting by targeting developers with an API and bulk data downloads. More user friendly features like a front-end browser, PDF scans, ngram browser, etc. are on the roadmap, but we're hoping other developers will step in and build some great tools as well.

RNCTX 8y ago
I'm assuming that as a university library team you're familiar with the Blacklight ecosystem of library search tools? I and a single Rails dev modified the current Blacklight codebase to handle PDFs (and other office docs) with minimal effort a few months ago, I think doing so when you get to PDF handling and a web UI would be a completely valid starting point. I'll save you the trouble of figuring out which is the only existing feasible open source library to sift through hundreds of thousands of PDF pages... QPDF is it.
- JackC 8y ago
  Thanks for this suggestion! We'll definitely kick Blacklight around as an option. We have a complex data model (cases, opinions, parties, citations, courts, jurisdictions, volumes ...), and tens of millions of pages, and weird access restrictions, and multiple output formats (text/html/xml/pdf), so whatever we end up with will have to be pretty custom.
  - spiralx 8y ago
    I worked for the British Medical Journal a while ago which had 120 years of articles digitised, along with several different medical databases, with around a dozen different applications utilising this content in various ways. It was basically all stored internally as XML using the Documentum/xDB CMS/XML database stack, with lots of XSLT used to generate content for different apps and in different formats. Not at all the easiest system to work with, but it does allow you to handle a lot of structured data such that you need the minimum amount of customisation possible - which is still a lot!

dandare 8y ago

I always wondered if any of the cases directly contradict each other.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

Can you elaborate on the notion of US case law, before the US existed? I don't mean this to be snarky, I assume this was intentional. Is this referring to cases prior to the US's founding, that the US then adopted as relevant legal precedent?

xxpor 8y ago
The US inherited the common law of England.
xxpor 8y ago
The US inherited the common law of England. There's usually something more relevant now, but you'll still sometimes see citations of old English cases or the Magna Carta.
JackC 8y ago
Good question! This refers to caselaw from courts that predate the United States, such as Maryland and Massachusetts: https://api.case.law/v1/cases/ https://api.case.law/v1/cases/ State courts didn't come into existence with the US Constitution -- the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, for example, dates back to 1692, and those precedents are still "good" in some sense though unlikely to be cited. We don't have English precedents, unfortunately, as guessed by some sibling comments.

bulldog13 8y ago

Do you have or know of, anything like this for federal courts (bankruptcy, district, appellate, supreme) ?

rezlieg 8y ago
project member here ... this site includes access to federal cases, e.g. https://api.case.law/v1/cases/?cite=&name_abbreviation=&jurisdiction=us&reporter=&decision_date_min=1900-01-01&decision_date_max=2000-12-31&docket_number=&court=&search=&full_case=&body_format= https://api.case.law/v1/cases/?cite=&name_abbreviation=&juri...

saltvedt 8y ago

The Norwegian equivalent of this project, got sued for copyright infringement of supreme court verdicts: http://www.wiumlie.no/2018/rettspraksis/10-22-returns http://www.wiumlie.no/2018/rettspraksis/10-22-returns

emmelaich 8y ago

Consider github. German and French law is already there. https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze https://github.com/steeve/france.code-civil https://github.com/steeve/france.code-civil