Thrilled today to announce the launch of case.law, a free public access point for 6.4M+ state and federal court decisions spanning our nation's entire history!
At api.case.law you'll find a browsable API that offers open access to descriptive metadata for the entire corpus. API documentation is at case.law/api/ -- written to be friendly to experts and beginners alike.
If you want full text of cases, you can download all Illinois and Arkansas decisions in bulk at case.law/bulk/download/. For other jurisdictions, register for a free account and API token to access full text for up to 500 cases per day.
If you are a research scholar and agree not to use the cases for other purposes or redistribute them, you can qualify for comprehensive bulk access. Request research access by creating an account at case.law/user/register/ and following the instructions on your account page.
Illinois and Arkansas are available now without limit because they publish authoritative versions of all of their appellate decisions online in machine-readable form with neutral citation. When others do the same, the access limits will disappear for their cases too.
We hope other jurisdictions will rapidly follow suit, and many are well on their way. For more on the drive toward digital-first publishing of court opinions: blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2017/07….
All of the data accessible at case.law is the product of a uniquely rewarding 5yr+ digitization and public access partnership between our team at @hlslib and our friends at @ravellaw, especially @nikwoodsreed and @lewis_daniel.
Nik and Daniel both deserve massive credit for the early vision and persistence needed to bring the project to life and the commitment and hard work to see it through to this point.
This includes Ravel's (now part of Lexis-Nexis) free-to-access public search interface (available at ravellaw.com) and its free-to-access API for non-commercial developers (available at home.ravellaw.com/api)
In addition, if you're a commercial developer building something that can use this data, Ravel/LN will offer commercial terms for access. Contact them at info.ravellaw.com/contact-us-form and let us know if you need any help getting in touch.
Too many colleagues and contributors to list here, but please take a look at case.law/about/#contrib… for the roster of folks who've worked on the project team. Before us came the many @hlslib librarians who expertly built and maintained the caselaw collection.
And of course this project owes a great deal to the inspiring, pioneering -- and very much continuing -- access-to-law efforts of @carlmalamud, @trbruce and @LIICornell, @mlissner and @FreeLawProject and many others leading the way. Thank you!
Lots of exciting work ahead! Our code is open, so if you have technical issues/ideas/feedback, tell us: github.com/harvard-lil/ca…. Let us know what you're building with and learning from this data. Please follow @caselawaccess and @HarvardLIL for more! /end
