I wrote about the Free Law Project here in the Studio back a few months ago. Why wouldn’t I? The Project is all about making public information freely available to the public. You can research and download material from state and federal courts for zip, nada, zilch.
More recently, I got an email from Michael Lissner, one of Free Law Project’s founders. He tipped me off to a massive influx of new material at the Project – LawBox made a huge data donation of 1.5 million opinions, opening up 350 new jurisdictions. You can grab it from FLP’s bulk download page, and see what is available from their coverage page.
They have also added a bunch of features – star pagination, improved citation “cross walk”, judge information, a database of all known reporters, and a database of American jurisdictions.
Well done, guys. I, for one, am rooting for you!
Unfortunately, the Free Law Project has decided to charge other organizations money to access RECAP documents, and it now denies access to organizations which refuse to pay. The new version of the RECAP plug-in only uploads documents to the FLP’s own CourtListener site, while other sites, such as PlainSite and the United States Courts Archive, are no longer being updated. This decision was made in secret with no public discussion, and it was made despite the FLP’s stated position that court documents should be free and freely available to everyone. For more information, please see https://www.plainsite.org/articles/20171130/why-plainsite-no-longer-supports-the-recap-initiative/