Brian Carver
Free Law Project is pleased to announce that its OpenJudiciary.org has
been selected as a winner of the Knight News Challenge on Elections, an
initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
The new project will make judicial elections more transparent for
journalists and researchers by creating online profiles of judges.
Profiles will show campaign contributions, judicial opinions, and
biographies.
“The project aims to fill an information gap by helping citizens
understand and meaningfully participate in judicial elections,” said
Chris Barr, Knight Foundation director for media innovation, who leads
the Prototype Fund.
A site such as OpenJudiciary.org is needed because big money is
infiltrating the judicial election process. Academic research has shown
that election years correlate with judges handing down harsher
sentences, even an increased frequency of death sentences.
The money in state judicial elections appears to cause not only a public
perception of partiality (judges being bought), but also real damage to
judicial impartiality as judges are forced to fundraise from the
attorneys and litigants that appear in their courts.
Free Law Project co-founder Brian Carver said, “It is currently
extremely difficult for voters, journalists, or academics to investigate
a judge’s past decisions and campaign contributors, and we expect
OpenJudiciary.org to change that.”
Free Law Project’s CourtListener platform already contains more than 2.6
million court opinions. By combining this data with campaign finance
data and other information about judges, OpenJudiciary.org will provide
a means of acquiring the necessary information that makes civic
engagement and informed voting possible.
Many go to the ballot box with simply no information about the judges up
for election or retention. Other voters have been subjected to a
constant barrage of vicious attack ads by outside groups with uncertain
motives.
The problem of judicial elections has received extensive high profile
coverage in the last year, with retired judges coming forward as
whistle
blowers,
the Supreme Court hearing a case on the
topic,
and evenpopular comedian John Oliver dedicating a segment to
it.
For those that want to get reliable non-partisan information about who
is funding a judge’s campaign and what that judge’s record is,
OpenJudiciary.org will be a vital new data source.
About Free Law Project
Free Law Project seeks to provide free
access to primary legal materials, develop legal research tools, and
support academic research on legal corpora. We work diligently with
volunteers to expand our efforts at building an open source, open
access, legal research ecosystem. Currently Free Law Project sponsors
the development of
CourtListener,
Juriscraper, and
RECAP.
About the John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promotes journalism
excellence world-wide and invests in the vitality of communities in the
United States where the Knight brothers once owned newspapers. Knight
Foundation invests in ideas and projects that can lead to
transformational change.
The Knight News Challenge on Elections is
funding breakthrough ideas that better inform voters and increase civic
participation before, during and after elections.
Contacts:
Free Law Project: Michael Lissner, Co-Founder & Project Lead; Brian
Carver, Co-Founder, [email protected]
Knight Foundation: Anusha Alikhan, Director of Communications, Knight
Foundation, 305-908-2646, [email protected]
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