Michael Lissner
I’m elated to announce today that I am officially taking the ropes of my
final project and letting it loose into the wild. It’s been seven months
since development on it officially started and finally, the beta version
is done.
If you haven’t been following along, the project
itself is an open source legal research tool
which allows anybody to keep up to date with federal precedents as they
are set by the 13 Federal Circuit courts. Right now, it has more than
130,000 documents in its corpus,
including almost all of the Supreme Court record dating back to 1754.
Every day it downloads the latest documents within about a half hour of
when each court publishes them.
One thing we’ve focused on while building the site has making it as
useful as possible for as many people as possible. Since not everybody
likes getting updates in their inbox, we’ve also tied the search engine
in with an Atom feed generator so that you can search for whatever you
want, and then follow updates in your feed reader.
Everything we’ve built uses a powerful boolean search engine on the
backend. At present, there are a ton of boolean
connectors that
you can use on our site to search our corpus or create alerts and feeds.
Unlike full text search that most people are familiar with, boolean
search allows incredibly complex queries, such as every document
mentioning Attorney General Holder that is published in the Third
Circuit of Appeals (@court ca3 @doctext
holder),
or perhaps every document that mentions “Roe” and “Wade” within ten
words of each other (@doctext “roe
wade”~10).
But that’s not all. Because we also want you to be able to use this
efficiently during your day-to-day searching, we’ve built an add-on
that will work in most browsers, which
allows you to search CourtListener.com without first going to our
homepage.
You can also browse all of documents in our corpus, or you can go to the
details page for an opinion, where you can read the text of its body
without having to download a PDF and crank up Adobe Acrobat.
As I mentioned earlier, this project has been designed as an open source
project, so if you’re looking for something to contribute to, look no
further. We have a very active bug
list
where you can dip your toes in, or if you prefer something meatier, we
can cook something up specifically for you.
I’ve greatly enjoyed working on this project so far, and I’d love to get
more people using it, working on it, and recommending it to their
friends. We’re already planning version 1.0, so drop me a line if you’re
interested in helping out, otherwise, go check it out
already, and see all that it has to offer!
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