I wrote about the Free Law Project here in the Studio back a few months ago. Why wouldn’t I? The Project is all about making public information freely available to the public. You can research and download material from state and federal courts for zip, nada, zilch.
More recently, I got an email from Michael Lissner, one of Free Law Project’s founders. He tipped me off to a massive influx of new material at the Project – LawBox made a huge data donation of 1.5 million opinions, opening...
Back in 2011, I wrote a post about the launch of CourtListener, a free website that lets you create alerts to notify you of new cases that match your search criteria. Today, the site announced that it is adding more than 1.5 million court opinions to its database, expanding its coverage to a total of 350 federal and state jurisdictions.
The cases were donated to CourtListener by LawBox, the company behind the LawBox legal research app for iOS devices.
Originally created by Michael Lissner...
Court opinions and records are in the public domain, and therefore open to the public, of course. But not for free – just try to secure a case from PACER. UC Berkeley School of Information assistant professor Brian Carver and UC Berkeley alumnus Michael Lissner have taken the law into their own hands, so to speak, and have formed a non-profit organization called the Free Law Project with the goal of providing free and easy to access legal content for download. As can be seen from their About...