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Caselaw Access Project

Last featured in the 04-19-2019 Scout Report, Caselaw Access Project continues to be a great resource for legal scholars. Readers both within and outside of the legal realm may enjoy the site's Gallery projects, including the Caselaw Limerick generator (which turns phrases from cases into creative prose). Readers with an interest in the U.S. legal system may want to take a look at the Caselaw Access Project (CAP), a massive digitization project that makes 360 years of American court cases publicly available online. This large database was created "by digitizing roughly 40 million pages of court decisions contained in roughly 40,000 bound volumes owned by the Harvard Law School Library," adding up to approximately 6.7 million unique cases with the earliest from 1658 and the most recent from 2018. Visitors can access this database through the CAP's open-access API, which the project states is "the best option for anybody interested in programmatically accessing our metadata, full-text search, or individual cases." CAP also offers a bulk download option for readers who need a large collection of cases. It should be noted that, while all CAP's data is freely available to the public, accessing the full text of a case requires registering for an account and at the time of this write-up visitors are limited to 500 cases per day. In addition to the case law database, the Gallery page catalogs creative projects that were designed using this data. Launched in October 2018, CAP is the result of a collaboration between the Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab and Ravel Law, a legal research company owned by Lexis-Nexis.
Archived Scout Publication URL
Scout Publication
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Date of Scout Publication
July 3rd, 2020
Date Of Record Creation
April 16th, 2019 at 4:04pm
Date Of Record Release
April 19th, 2019 at 3:05pm
Resource URL Clicks
321
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