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

Minna Fingerhood graduated from the University of Pennsylvania this past May with a B.A. in Science, Technology, and Society (STSC) and Engineering Entrepreneurship. She is currently a data scientist in New York and is passionate about the intersection of technology, law, and data ethics.

The United States Criminal Justice System is the largest in the world. With more than 2.3 million inmates, the US incarcerates more than 25% of the world’s prison population, even as its general population only accounts for 5%. As a result, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the system has become increasingly congested, inefficient, and at times indifferent.

Read more of "Guest Post: Creating a Case Recommendation System Using Gensim’s Doc2Vec"

Although it is excellent, and I recommend it very highly, I had not expected Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene to shed light on the Caselaw Access Project. Near the end of the book, he writes,

The study of the humanities is nothing less than the patient nurturing of the roots and heirloom varietals of human symbolic life. This nurturing is a practice not strictly of curation, as many seem to think today, but of active attention, cultivation, making and remaking. It is not enough for the archive to be stored, mapped, or digitized. It must be worked.

The value of the Caselaw Access Project is not primarily in preservation, saving space, or the abstraction of being machine-readable; it is in its new uses, the making of things from the raw material. We at LIL and others have begun to make new things, but we’re only at the beginning. We hope you will join us, and surprise us.

This tutorial is an introduction to creating a data analysis workspace with Voyant and the Caselaw Access Project API. Voyant is a computational analysis tool for text corpora.

Read more of "Creating a Data Analysis Workspace with Voyant and the CAP API"

Unlike anywhere else in the world, most judges in the United States today are elected. But it hasn’t always been this way. Over the past two centuries, the American states have taken a variety of different paths, alternating through a variety of elective and appointive methods. Opponents of judicial elections charge that these institutions detract from judicial independence, harm the legitimacy of the judiciary, and put unqualified jurists on the bench; those who support judicial elections counter that, by publicly involving the American people in the process of judicial selection, judicial elections can enhance judicial legitimacy. To say this has been an intense debate of academic, political, and popular interest is an understatement.

Read more of "Guest Post: Do Elected and Appointed Judges Write Opinions Differently?"

This month we’re sharing new ways to start working with data from the Caselaw Access Project. This CAP code share from Anastasia Aizman shows us how to get opinion authors from cases with the CAP API and CourtListener: Get opinion author!

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Today we’re sharing Lawvocado, our newsletter from the Caselaw Access Project.

Delivered right to your inbox, Lawvocado will be the source for news and developments from the Caselaw Access Project and stories in our orbit.

Subscribe and catch up with our first issue.

In this tutorial we’re going to learn how to retrieve a case by citation using the Caselaw Access Project’s case browser.

Read more of "Tutorial: Retrieve Cases by Citation with the CAP Case Browser"

This post is about a research paper (preprint) on sentence retrieval for statutory interpretation that we presented at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2019) held in June at Montreal, Canada. The paper describes some of our recent work on computational methods for statutory interpretation carried out at the University of Pittsburgh. The idea is to focus on vague statutory concepts and enable a program to retrieve sentences that explain the meaning of such concepts. The Library Innovation Lab’s Caselaw Access Project (CAP) provides an ideal corpus of case law that is needed for such work.

Read more of "Computational Support for Statutory Interpretation with Caselaw Access Project Data"

The Caselaw Access Project API offers a way to view the corpus of U.S. case law. This tutorial will review how to run a CAP API call to return all cases decided 100 years ago today in your command line.

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Today we’re announcing a new data release for the Caselaw Access Project. This update includes:

• In-text figures and illustrations in cases. An example, from Sussman v. Cooper (1976), is below.
• Inline page numbers. You can provide a pin cite to a specific page in a case by adding #p123 to the URL, or just by clicking the page number.
• Italic formatting in case text, as detected by OCR.

Read more of "Caselaw Access Project: Summer 2019 Data Release"