Free Law Project is a
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
federal
501(c)(3)
A 501(c)(3) organization is a United States corporation, trust, unincorporated association or other type of organization exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. It is one of the 29 types of 50 ...
an
Oakland
Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third largest city overall in the Bay A ...
-based
nonprofit
A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...
that provides free access to primary legal materials, develops legal research tools, and supports academic research on legal corpora. Free Law Project has several initiatives that collect and share legal information, including the largest
[
collection of American oral argument audio, daily collection of new ]legal opinions
In law, a legal opinion is in certain jurisdictions a written explanation by a judge or group of judges that accompanies an order or ruling in a case, laying out the rationale and legal principles for the ruling.
Opinions are in those jurisdict ...
from 200 United States courts and administrative bodies, the RECAP Project, which collects documents from PACER, and user-generated Supreme Court
A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of courts in most legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, apex court, and high (or final) court of appeal. Broadly speaking, the decisions of ...
citation visualization
Visualization or visualisation may refer to:
*Visualization (graphics), the physical or imagining creation of images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message
* Data visualization, the graphic representation of data
* Information visualiz ...
s. Their data helped The Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
expose 138 cases of Conflict of Interest
A conflict of interest (COI) is a situation in which a person or organization is involved in multiple interests, financial or otherwise, and serving one interest could involve working against another. Typically, this relates to situations i ...
cases regarding violations by USA Federal judges.
Initiatives
Free Law Project has a number of initiatives, including:
* CourtListener.com, which provides a searchable and API-accessible website with court dockets, 900,000 minutes of oral argument recordings, more than eight thousand judges, and more than three million opinions. All of the opinions on CourtListener are interlinked by a citator, and the graph of citation is available via an API.
* RECAP Project, which allows users to automatically search for free copies of documents during a search in the fee-based online US legal database PACER, creating a free alternative database at the Internet Archive and CourtListener.
* Judge and Appointer Database, which provides biographical and electoral information about more than 8,000 American judges and appointors.
* Database of Reporters, which provides information about more than 400 legal reporters
A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalism ...
.
*Courts-DB, which provides information about more than 700 US courts.
All of Free Law Project's work is open source and available online.
RECAP
RECAP[ It was created in 2009 by a team from Princeton University's ]Center for Information Technology Policy
The Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University is a leading interdisciplinary research center, dedicated to exploring the intersection of technology, engineering, public policy, and the social sciences. Faculty, stu ...
and Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
's Berkman Center
The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 200 ...
,Free Law Project
Free Law Project is a United States federal 501(c)(3) an Oakland-based nonprofit that provides free access to primary legal materials, develops legal research tools, and supports academic research on legal corpora. Free Law Project has severa ...
. The name "RECAP" derives from "PACER", spelled backward.Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and a ...
add-on, Google Chrome extension
Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macO ...
, and Safari extension. For each PACER document, the software will first check if it has already been uploaded by another user. If no free version exists and the user purchases the document from PACER, it will automatically upload a copy to the RECAP server, thereby building the database.Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
; as of late 2017, the Free Law Project version now uploads documents to the Free Law Project, with a promise to mirror that data to the Internet Archive on a quarterly basis.Aaron Swartz
Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. A prolific programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS, the tech ...
set up an automatic download from an official library entry point to PACER. Swartz downloaded 2.7 million documents, all public domain, representing less than 1 percent of the documents in PACER. These public domain documents were later uploaded to RECAP and made available to the public for free. However, the automated downloading triggered a government investigation. No criminal charges were filed, because PACER had provided lawful access and the documents copied were in the public domain, and the case was closed.
Some courts have acknowledged RECAP's free distribution of documents. A small handful of PACER users receive fee-exempt access (fee waivers are granted on a district-by-district basis), and a condition of the fee waiver generally requires that fee exempt users not further distribute documents they receive under the waiver, pursuant to Judicial Conference policy.ECF ECF may refer to:
Science, technology and medicine
* East Coast fever or ''theileriosis'', a disease of cattle in Africa
* Electrochemical fluorination
* Elemental chlorine free, a form of paper bleaching
* Enterocutaneous fistula
* Evolving c ...
page: "fee exempt PACER users must refrain from the use of RECAP".
CourtListener
CourtListener,Open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
software, "which allows the public to bulk-download any of its content," which is an archive hosting court transcripts.
See also
* Free Access to Law Movement
The Free Access to Law Movement (FALM) is the international movement and organization devoted to providing free online access to legal information such as case law, legislation, treaties, law reform proposals and legal scholarship. The movement b ...
References
External links
*
CourtListener
provides free access to federal court documents that someone has already purchased for RECAP / CourtListener and invites users to purchase a copy of others for CourtListener / RECAP.
RECAP The Law Project homepage
Judge and Appointer Database
*
{{Authority control
American legal websites
Free Access to Law Movement
Free Firefox WebExtensions
Google Chrome extensions
Legal organizations based in the United States
Legal software
Non-profit organizations based in the United States
Online companies of the United States
Organizations established in 2013
2009 establishments in the United States