Caselaw Access Project Shares Scanned Images for Open Jurisdictions

Posted by Kelly Fitzpatrick

The Caselaw Access Project now has scanned images available for download as PDF, with selectable text, for all open-access jurisdictions, including Arkansas, Illinois, North Carolina and New Mexico. To download scanned images by volume, visit our downloads page and browse to the volume you seek: https://case.law/download/PDFs/open/.

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Some Recent Perma Use

Posted by Ben Steinberg

You may have seen Perma.cc links in a number of documents of current interest, including the Trial Memorandum of the U.S. House of Representatives in the Impeachment Trial of President Donald J. Trump (archived at https://perma.cc/BG56-2KXH) and the Trial Memorandum of President Donald J. Trump (archived at https://perma.cc/XG5W-KRQF). Interestingly, both documents cite Perma links without citing the original URL that Perma archived; generally, you would include both in your citation.

As an exercise, I used Perma’s public API to look up the URLs for the Perma links cited in these two documents; here are CSV files listing the 148 links in the House Memorandum (one ill-formed) and the 129 links in the President’s memorandum. (Note that both CSV files include duplicates, as some links are repeated in each document; I’m leaving the duplicates in place in case you want to read along with the original documents.)

Guest Post: Is the US Supreme Court in lockstep with Congress when it comes to abortion?

Posted by Abdul Abdulrahim

This guest post is part of the CAP Research Community Series. This series highlights research, applications, and projects created with Caselaw Access Project data.

Abdul Abdulrahim is a graduate student at the University of Oxford completing a DPhil in Computer Science. His primary interests are in the use of technology in government and law and developing neural-symbolic models that mitigate the issues around interpretability and explainability in AI. Prior to the DPhil, he worked as an advisor to the UK Parliament and a lawyer at Linklaters LLP.

The United States of America (U.S.) has seen declining public support for major political institutions, and a general disengagement with the processes or outcomes of the branches of government. According to Pew’s Public Trust in Government survey earlier this year, “public trust in the government remains near historic lows,” with only 14% of Americans stating that they can trust the government to do “what is right” most of the time. We believed this falling support could affect the relationship between the branches of government and the independence they might have.

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Using Machine Learning to Extract Nuremberg Trials Transcript Document Citations

Posted by Rosa Lin, Scott Jones, and Paul Deschner

In Harvard’s Nuremberg Trials Project, being able to link to cited documents in each trial’s transcript is a key feature of site navigation. Each document submitted into evidence by prosecution and defense lawyers is introduced in the transcript and discussed, and the site user is offered the possibility at each document mention to click open the document and view its contents and attendant metadata. While document references generally follow various standard patterns, deviations from the pattern large and small are numerous, and correctly identifying the type of document reference – is this a prosecution or defense exhibit, for example – can be quite tricky, often requiring teasing out contextual clues.

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