The Cambridge Law Corpus: A corpus for legal AI research

Harvard Law's Library Innovation Lab has the Caselaw Access Project— a complete collection of precedential US caselaw with structured metadata. It's at https://case.law. It's readable online (including the original pdfs for most,) accessible via a rest API in fully structured documents, and through bulk downloads. There are OCR mistakes here and there, but the accuracy is over 99% even with weird things like the "long s" that looked like an f that was common before the 20th century. While updates are too slow to replace the commercial tools, it's perfect for uses like this... Rather, it will be in a little over 3 months. In Feb of 2018, it was released under agreement with a funder to limit access to 500 cases per day per user for 6 years except for a few jurisdictions available now— so the entire corpus will be completely open then.

They scanned, OCR'd, and applied metadata to 40k volumes, and (digitally) redacted by hand all commercial material (eg head notes, key citations) in all in-copyright volumes, so what's left is entirely in the public domain.

Disclosure: worked on that project for several years.

This one isn't even paywalled. Won't give you access even if you have money.

> Applications for access to the Cambridge Law Corpus (CLC) can only be made by researchers who are employed full-time by a recognised university or other research institution. The applicant must hold a permanent position at the level of Assistant Professor (or higher) or equivalent.

You can get all the patent data from the USPTO for free:

https://github.com/lettergram/parse-uspto-xml/tree/master

Why is this comment being downvoted? If it's not true it would be nice to explicitly say so.

Its amazing how one-sided the public nature of prosecutions are in the sense that they are entitled to everything that is advantageous to the government/harmful to the defendant in the name of the public but they can't quite extend that to ensuring the public has the necesary tools to understand, interpret and successfully operate within the domain of, and sometimes (God forbid) "against" (in an adversarial, not contravening sense) the law itself by playing within its rules to their own benefit or advantage as they should arguably be fully entitled and empowered to.

Assuming its consistent with fundamental justice and precedant (which shouldn't really necessarily require an advanced legal education to competently analyse and resynthesize into a case that integrates the facts of the case in question), we should value the abillity of the citizenry and all litigants in general to quickly and easily present an informed meritorious case and not rely on obfuscation or access issues rooted in technology and deficiencies of any given education system to limit participants' capabillities unduly.

Aren't legal proceedings generally public information?

All court records, filings, judgements, laws, and reviews are public records unless sealed by the courts. It's a matter of whether they have been digitalized or not.

In the US you have the 4th amendment which proscribes unreasonable search and seizure but that is not a right to privacy. Thus, there is no such right articulated in the amendments themselves. Therefore, it's decided by case law (which is how all such things are decided in common law systems of jurisprudence). Chief amongst such cases is Griswold v. Connecticut, where the ruling found such a right is established by the constitution through a "reading between the lines" (penumbral reasoning).

Okay this isn't conlaw 101 but my point is privacy and right to privacy are technical terms, possibly unintuitive to you. Now someone's rights may have been arrogate here - I don't know - but that would be again argued in a court of law.