Legal Data APIs and Replication

Since 2010, the nonprofit Free Law Project has been working to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive using technology, data and advocacy. It may be best known for CourtListener, its flagship project that houses an immense collection of court orders…

Federal, state and local court e-filing systems are a Tower of Babel-like mishmash of proprietary technologies and paywalls that inhibit public access to court documents.

Now, the Free Law Project, a nonprofit devoted to making legal information publicly and freely available, has received a grant to design and prototype an open access and open…

A new partnership between Free Law Project, a nonprofit devoted to making legal information publicly and freely available, and vLex, the international legal research platform, will enable Free Law Project to complete its goal of collecting every precedential court decision from the federal courts and state appellate courts and making them available to…

One way to avoid the cost of downloading documents from the federal courts’ PACER database is by getting them instead from the RECAP Archive, a database of millions of PACER documents and dockets maintained by the Free Law Project.

But before you can get a document out of RECAP, the document had to…

It still costs money to download documents from PACER, even though the Senate Judiciary Committee last week advanced a bipartisan bill that would eliminate those fees.

But one way you can reduce PACER fees is through the Free Law Project’s RECAP project, by which PACER users install a browser extension that automatically adds…

In an explosive exposé last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that 131 federal judges broke the law by hearing cases where they had a financial interest.

To uncover those violations, reporters reviewed the financial holdings of some 700 federal judges and compared them against tens of thousands of court cases.

The data…

Disagreement over recent changes to a program designed to provide public access to federal court documents has developed into a feud of sorts between two advocates for free and open access to government information – and implicated in it is a cast of characters that includes the man who created the original version of Facebook,…

After nearly a year of effort, the Free Law Project has downloaded every opinion and order from the federal courts’ PACER system and has made them available for search through its RECAP archive of PACER documents.

The collection contains approximately 3.4 million orders and opinions from approximately 1.5 million federal district and…

Free Law Project has discovered a major vulnerability in the federal courts’ PACER system that could allow third parties to use a registered PACER account to purchase and download content such as docket reports and case filings. The vulnerability possibly could also be used by a malicious website to make…

The Free Law Project, a non-profit dedicated to providing free, public access to primary legal materials, has announced plans to download all of the free opinions and order available on PACER, the federal courts’ system for electronic access to court records.

Although PACER charges fees for downloading case documents and dockets, it does…

Free Law Project has launched a database of biographical information on some 8,500 federal and state judges. The database can be searched through Free Law Project’s Courtlistener. It also can be downloaded as bulk data or accessed via APIs (application…

The Free Law Project — which I mentioned here just recently when it added 1.5 million opinions to CourtListener — had more big news…