In Favor of the Caselaw Access Project; The Harvard Crimson, November 7, 2018

The Crimson Editorial Board, The Harvard Crimson; In Favor of the Caselaw Access Project

"We hope that researchers will use these court opinions to further advance academic scholarship in this area. In particular, we hope that computer programmers are able to take full advantage of this repository of information. As Ziegler noted, no lawyer will be able to take full advantage of the millions of pages in the database, but computers have an advantage in this regard. Like Ziegler, we are hopeful that researchers using the database will be able to learn more about less understood aspects of the legal system — such as how courts influence each other and deal with disagreements. Those big-picture questions could not have been answered as well without the information provided by this new database.

This project is a resounding success for the Harvard Library, which happens also to be looking for a new leader. We hope that the person hired for the job will be similarly committed to projects that increase access to information — a key value that all who work in higher education should hold near and dear. In addition to maintaining the vast amounts of histories and stories already in the system, Harvard’s libraries should seek to illuminate content that may have been erased or obscured. There is always more to learn."

Harvard Converts Millions of Legal Documents into Open Data; Government Technology, November 2, 2018

Theo Douglas, Government Technology; Harvard Converts Millions of Legal Documents into Open Data

[Kip Currier: Discovered the recent launch of this impressive Harvard University-anchored Caselaw Access Project, while updating a lecture for next week on Open Data.

The free site provides access to highly technical data, full text cases, and even "quirky" but fascinating legal info...like the site's Gallery, highlighting instances in which "witchcraft" is mentioned in legal cases throughout the U.S.

Check out this new site...and spread the word about it!] 


"A new free website spearheaded by the Library Innovation Lab at the Harvard Law School makes available nearly 6.5 million state and federal cases dating from the 1600s to earlier this year, in an initiative that could alter and inform the future availability of similar areas of public-sector big data.

Led by the Lab, which was founded in 2010 as an arena for experimentation and exploration into expanding the role of libraries in the online era, the Caselaw Access Project went live Oct. 29 after five years of discussions, planning and digitization of roughly 100,000 pages per day over two years.

The effort was inspired by the Google Books Project; the Free Law Project, a California 501(c)(3) that provides free, public online access to primary legal sources, including so-called “slip opinions,” or early but nearly final versions of legal opinions; and the Legal Information Institute, a nonprofit service of Cornell University that provides free online access to key legal materials."