Free Law Project is Scanning America’s Case Law; Goal is to Scan 2.5 Million Pages by the Fall

From a FLP Announcement:

Since our founding, Free Law Project has worked tirelessly to create a complete database of every American legal decision ever written. In 2024, we announced that we added historical case law digitized by Harvard Law Library to CourtListener. This made our platform one of the most comprehensive and transparent sources of case law.

Today we’re announcing the next milestone. We’re picking up where Harvard left off by scanning and digitizing thousands of books that have since been published.

This is a step that we’ve been planning for years and that is essential to make CourtListener complete. These scans build on our system of court scrapers, and fill the gap between when the Harvard data ends, in 2018, and today.

This is a large-scale effort. So far we have scanned over 200,000 pages of case law. Our immediate goal is to scan 2.5 million pages by the fall, and we will continue scanning books as they are published so that the CourtListener collection is, and remains, comprehensive.

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A key part of what makes this possible is a new system we developed called Blackletter. This tool uses machine learning to intelligently identify and remove editorial material from the scans of the books. Legal opinions themselves are unquestionably public domain, but the editorial additions layered on top of them are sometimes challenged as copyrightable. Separating the two has historically been a labor-intensive, manual process, but Blackletter automates this, allowing us to do millions of redactions nearly in real time.

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Filed under: Data Files, Digital Preservation, Libraries, News