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Free legal research tools and database From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Free Law Project is a United States federal 501(c)(3) Oakland-based[1] nonprofit that provides free access to primary legal materials, develops legal research tools, and supports academic research on legal corpora.[2] Free Law Project has several initiatives that collect and share legal information, including the largest [3] collection of American oral argument audio,[4] daily collection of new legal opinions from 200 United States courts and administrative bodies, the RECAP Project, which collects documents from PACER, and user-generated Supreme Court citation visualizations. Their data helped The Wall Street Journal expose 138 cases of conflict of interest cases regarding violations by federal judges.[3][5]
![]() Free Law Project Logo | |
Abbreviation | FLP |
---|---|
Formation | 2013-09-24 |
Founders | Michael Lissner, Brian Carver |
Founded at | Emeryville, CA |
Type | 501(c)(3) |
46-3342480 | |
Registration no. | C3594588 |
Legal status | Charity |
Headquarters | Oakland, CA |
Services | CourtListener, RECAP, Bots.law |
Executive Director | Michael Lissner |
Michael Lissner, Brian Carver, Ansel Halliburton | |
Website | free |
Free Law Project was founded in 2013 by Michael Lissner and Brian Carver.[6]
Free Law Project has a number of initiatives, including:
RECAP[11] is software which allows users to automatically search for free copies of documents during a search in the fee-based online U.S. federal court document database PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), and to help build up a free alternative database.[12] It was created in 2009 by a team from Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy and Harvard University's Berkman Center,[11] and is now maintained as part of the Free Law Project. The name "RECAP" derives from "PACER", spelled backward.[13]
RECAP is available as a Mozilla Firefox add-on, Google Chrome extension, and Safari extension.[14] For each PACER document, the software will first check if it has already been uploaded by another user. If no free version exists and the user purchases the document from PACER, it will automatically upload a copy to the RECAP server, thereby building the database.[12] The original RECAP implementation uploaded documents to the Internet Archive; as of late 2017, the Free Law Project version now uploads documents to the Free Law Project, with a promise to mirror that data to the Internet Archive on a quarterly basis.[15]
PACER continued charging per page fees after the introduction of RECAP.[16]
Prior to the creation of RECAP, activist Aaron Swartz set up an automatic download from an official library entry point to PACER.
Swartz downloaded 2.7 million documents, all public domain, representing less than 1 percent of the documents in PACER.[17] These public domain documents were later uploaded to RECAP and made available to the public for free.
However, the automated downloading triggered a government investigation. No criminal charges were filed, because PACER had provided lawful access and the documents copied were in the public domain, and the case was closed.
Some courts have acknowledged RECAP's free distribution of documents. A small handful of PACER users receive fee-exempt access (fee waivers are granted on a district-by-district basis), and a condition of the fee waiver generally requires that fee exempt users not further distribute documents they receive under the waiver, pursuant to Judicial Conference policy.[18] Some courts such as the District Court for the District of Massachusetts display a prominent reminder on its ECF page: "fee exempt PACER users must refrain from the use of RECAP".[19]
CourtListener[6][20] is an open source software project to archive and host court documents.
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