Hi All,
A few more free case law items... We have (1) added a database of
Federal District Court Opinions (with full text search) and (2) added
nice icons to the Federal District Courts' Case Filings where we have
an opinion or order, and also added Judge/case-type pages. Add as
always, lot's of RSS feeds.
1. US Federal District Court Opinions with Full Text Search
We have put online the Federal District Court case opinions and
orders that are available using the opinion report in the Federal
Courts' ECF. These are updated daily.
Here is the URL for the Federal District Court Opinions:
http://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/
CATEGORIZATION & RSS FEEDS - We have categorized the opinions by
state, court, type of lawsuit and judge and combinations of judge and
type of lawsuit. You can also subscribe to each of categories through
RSS feeds to track a judge or court's decisions on different issues.
And we also give the cause of action for each case.
FULL TEXT SEARCH - We are using Google's hosted Business Custom
Search Engine (http://www.google.com/enterprise/csbe/) for the full
text search. Google is now OCRing PDF image files, so even PDF files
that have images of scanned documents will be in most cases full text
indexable and searchable. Like the OCR of Google's Book Search. You
will need to look at the cached copy to see the highlighted searched
text though, and then find in the original PDF to be 100% that what
you are reading is correct. Google should be doing a pretty good job
of indexing and ocring these court decisions, although it may take a
few days for a new document to show up in the index.
We allow one to search across all of the documents, or to limit the
search to Federal District Courts in a particular state or an
individual Federal District Court. You can also search by party name,
court and filed date.
We currently have these opinions and orders since 2004 and will be
including those from previous years in the next week or so (there are
not many before 2004 in the ECF system).
DATA LIMITATIONS - This data set does NOT include all of the Federal
District Court opinions.
a. Not all of the courts have upgraded to ECF 2.4. So we do
not have opinions for those courts that have not upgraded.
b. Not all opinions and orders are included by the Judges. As
is stated on the PACER site
"Written opinions have been defined by the Judicial Conference as
'any document issued by a judge or judges of the court sitting in
that capacity, that sets forth a reasoned explanation for a court's
decision.' The responsibility for determining which documents meet
this definition rests with the authoring judge."
Some judges have chosen not to include any of their opinions in the
opinion report.
c. Some scans of are such poor quality that the OCR failed.
2. Us Federal District Court Case Filings Updated with Nice Opinion Icons
We have also noted on the federal district court case filing database
when we have a judge's opinion (you will see a little gavel :). The
case filings are at:
And we have added browse pages and RSS feeds by judge. That should
make it easier to find other cases a particular judge has ruled on
that are covering similar issues (at least at the broad case type
level). Then if we have the opinions or orders online, you can see
what the judge wrote, or you may need to log into the court's ECF
system and obtain the briefs and other filings (and pay a small per
page fee).
The case filings and opinion databases are related, as they both have
Federal Court data, it is just that the opinions database is limited
to those cases where we have opinions.
There are some other free case law projects going on (featured cases
with all filings, resource.org...), but more on those in a later
posting to the list...
Now for the real important stuff... time to go check out those new
touch ipods and video ipod nanos - http://www.apple.com/ipod/ :)
Peace,
Tim
cross posted: NetLawyers and Law-Lib
-- ------------------------------------------------------------ Timothy Stanley tstanley@justia.com World Peace - Good Idea http://justia.com
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