Brian Carver
Yesterday Mark Boyd published a great story about the CourtListener API
on Programmable
Web.
Mark talked to several of the API’s early adopters and really learned
what the issues are and how people are addressing them. Thanks to all
those quoted in the story for taking the time to talk with Mark about
the CourtListener REST
API. We’re excited about
how you all are already using the API and hope to continue improving it.
(There’s nothing like people hitting your website thousands of times a
day to shake loose hard-to-find bugs…and we’ve had some of that too
and hope to get any and all bugs resolved ASAP!)
I particularly like Waldo Jaquith‘s
sentiment quoted in the article that 24 months from now we will find it
quaint that anyone found this interesting. I sure hope so! That will
mean we’ve made many advances and the thought of not having an API for
United States case law will seem unimaginable. Unfortunately, free
programmatic access–even digital access–to U.S. case law has been
not much more than a fanciful dream for a long time in the legal
technology community. For years we’ve been like a textile industry that
knows the cotton gin exists and even knows how to build one, and yet no
one ever has built one. We now have in place a key tool necessary to
enable a revolution. We also need the raw materials: the court documents
themselves, and we’ll continue to work on that until we can confidently
say we’ve got that fully covered, but in 24 months I think we’ll look
back and not only find it quaint that this was interesting in 2013, but
also we’ll mark this time as an important turning point, where the seed
for that legal technology revolution was planted.
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