The Court Listener

Michael Lissner and Brian Carver created CourtListener.com, an alert service covering the U.S. federal appellate courts, a database of opinions with more than 750,000 documents, including the Supreme Court corpus since 1754. Rowyn McDonald and Karen Rustad created a legal citatory on it. The site is provided at no cost. The site's code is under open source licenses. All documents, with citation relationships, can be downloaded in bulk providing a large corpora of English-language documents research and collaboration. As time permits, we'll discuss: (1) Frequent (often angry) requests that court opinions be removed from their site or blocked from discovery by search engines and a study of requests made. Who makes such requests and why. Recommendations for a balance between access and privacy. (2) There are 100+ court websites, many with poor funding or prioritization. Gaining a higher-level view of the law can be challenging. "Juriscraper" is a new project, spun out of CourtListener, designed to ease problems for those who wanting court opinions daily. The project is under active development, and we are looking for others to get involved. Michael Lissner will describe the difficulties and complexities of building Juriscraper, and discuss some of our solutions to these problems. (3) Finally, we will describe how Rowyn and Karen built an online application which detects citations in court opinions, creates links between cases, and tracks the resulting citation network. Problems encountered and solved, and directions for future work, with a demo of the citator.