The Library Innovation Lab at Harvard University has just released the Caselaw Access Project (CAP), an initiative that aims to make available all published U.S. court decisions:
CAP includes all official, book-published United States case law — every volume designated as an official report of decisions by a court within the United States.
Our scope includes all state courts, federal courts, and territorial courts for American Samoa, Dakota Territory, Guam, Native American Courts, Navajo Nation, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Our earliest case is from 1658, and our most recent cases are from 2018.
Each volume has been converted into structured, case-level data broken out by majority and dissenting opinion, with human-checked metadata for party names, docket number, citation, and date.
The project team has digitized over 40 million pages, representing 6.5 million unique cases. Users can access the data via a bulk download or by using the project’s API.
dh+lib Review
This post was produced through a cooperation among Jennifer Matthews, Valentina Vavassori, Christine Davidian, Joseph Grobelny, Patti McCall, Susanne Pichler, and Dale J. Correa (Editors-at-large for the week), Sarah Melton (Editor for the week), and Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Roxanne Shirazi, and Patrick Williams (dh+lib Review Editors).