Thread by @FreeLawProject

Four years in the making, today we are announcing a new one-of-a-kind database containing the investment and conflict information for every federal judge. Spanning 17 years, this database was extracted from over 250,000 pages of judicial financial records. free.law/2021/09/28/ann…

In tandem with developing this new data, we collaborated with a team of investigative journalists at The Wall Street Journal.

They spent the past several months diving into the data. The first of their groundbreaking reports is out today: wsj.com/articles/131-f…

To build this database, we collected over 27,000 financial disclosure forms filed by federal judges, magistrates, and justices. We are releasing over 1.5M investment transactions, 29,000 reimbursements, 1,700 gifts, and more. Details here: courtlistener.com/coverage/finan…

All of this will be available via our APIs, replicated database, and website in the coming days. We're working on it! 😅

Financial disclosures by judges were mandated in 1978 by the Ethics in Gov't Act, a Watergate transparency reform. Until today, these forms have never been compiled into a database. It was too hard to get the documents and too complicated to extract the info they contained.

So, 43 years after these forms were mandated, we're thrilled to be finally putting them online for public inspection. To learn more about the project and the coming timeline, please see our post explaining everything: free.law/2021/09/28/ann…

Finally, if you're not familiar with us, we're a non-profit that's dedicated to improving the legal ecosystem. We rely on donations to keep the lights on. Huge technical projects like this are extraordinarily expensive. Please support us if you can. free.law/donate/

Here's a better link to the main story: wsj.com/articles/131-f…

Here's how the WSJ did it with our new database: wsj.com/articles/how-t…

Here's a data viz: wsj.com/articles/hidde…

Here's a sidebar about the law: wsj.com/articles/a-pos…

"In the 685 violations uncovered by the Journal’s investigation, 56 judges have since directed court clerks to notify parties in 328 lawsuits that they violated the stock-ownership rule and should have recused themselves. "

"When judges participated in such cases, about two-thirds of their rulings on motions that were contested came down in favor of their or their family’s financial interests. "

"“I dropped the ball. Thank you for helping me stay on my toes the way I’m supposed to.”
— Judge Lewis Babcock