Free Law Project is a

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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 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 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 visuali ...

s. Their data helped

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expose 138 cases of Conflict of Interest cases regarding violations by USA Federal judges. Free Law Project was founded in 2013 by Michael Lissner and Brian Carver.

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 is software which allows users to automatically search for free copies of documents during a search in the fee-based online U.S. federal court document database PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), and to help build up a free alternative database. It was created in 2009 by a team from Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy and

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, and is now maintained as part of the Free Law Project. The name "RECAP" derives from "PACER", spelled backward. RECAP is available as a Mozilla Firefox 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. The original RECAP implementation uploaded documents to the

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. PACER continued charging per page fees after the introduction of RECAP. Prior to the creation of RECAP, activist

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. Some courts such as the District Court for the District of Massachusetts display a prominent reminder on its

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page: "fee exempt PACER users must refrain from the use of RECAP".

CourtListener

CourtListener, (like Free Law Project) is Open source software, "which allows the public to bulk-download any of its content," which is an archive hosting court transcripts.

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

Initiatives

RECAP

CourtListener

See also

References

External links