Three hundred and sixty years of United States caselaw

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.

It looks like the link from the map is using "wa" for Washington, when it should be "wash".

I'm curious now. Some states do use a 2 letter code, some use 3, and some use 4. Why didn't you use the same naming format for all of them?

<clicks "New Rhyme!" button>

...

> It is expressly laid down in Bull

> I refer to the receipt in full.

> The company first.

> Decision reversed.

> Did they state they would replace your wool?

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.

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.)

To answer your question re: its origins being publicly funded, no. When there was no internet database to connect to people bought the books from a print publisher (either at huge maintenance cost or sparingly at the expense of not knowing what was current). The print publishers bore the cost and reaped the profits of consolidating all of this data.

To answer the next obvious question: yes, there are probably people in prison or not depending on whether a small town law library bought the updates from West Law in a timely fashion 20 years ago.

Yes and no. It’s important to realize that the US courts (1) are a distributed system comprising hundreds of autonomous courts; and (2) predate the internet, photocopiers, telephones, telegraph, a large centralized federal government, and indeed the federal government itself.

Today court opinions are published as PDFs on courts’ websites. But back in the day, they were published as slip opinions stored in the clerk’ office of each individual court. Private companies like West undertook to collect cases from all these hundreds of courts and publish them in books called “reporters.” Back then (and even today) that meant sending someone out to hundreds of courts to collect and copy the decisions. They not only published the opinions, they organized everything within a comprehensive ontology of their own creation, and added their own annotations.

When computers were invented a century later, these publishers were well placed to digitize their collections and offer access to them over pre-internet electronic systems. Then, of course, those moved to the Internet.

Even collecting these cases together on a going forward basis is no easy task. As noted above, the courts are decentralized, by design, even within the federal system. Just getting the decisions from hundreds of courts and uploading them would be an expensive endeavor. Nothing stops someone from undertaking this—court decisions themselves cannot be copyrighted and you’re free to go to and court and ask to copy published decisions.

If you’re just looking for a nice case browsing interface, in the interim, you should check out Ravel’s site.

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.

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.