Last month marked a milestone for the Caselaw Access Project (CAP), an ambitious project from the Harvard Law Library Innovation Lab to digitize centuries of U.S. federal and state case law for free public access. Launched in 2016 with the financial backing of online legal research company Ravel Law (now owned by LexisNexis), the Caselaw Access Project involved the digitization of more than 36 million pages of printed case reporters. The original agreement contained a commercial use restriction for eight years, which has now expired. The Innovation Lab commemorated the occasion with a conference on March 8, highlighting the history of the project and use cases for the future. For more information on the history of the project, see Adam Ziegler's guest post at Bob Ambrogi's Law Sites.
The Search feature on the legacy version of the CAP website links to CourtListener's Advanced Case Law Search, which has incorporated the CAP content. The beta version of the CAP website still provides direct access to individual case scans in the reporter volumes and bulk data downloads.
As the CAP About page explains, PDF scans of case law in the project date up to 2018 and are limited to precedential cases published in official case reporters. Jurisdictions that have designated a commercial reporter as the "official" publication of primary case law are included, but generally the parallel commercial/regional reporter publications will not be found here; when they are, their copyrighted material (such as West headnotes) will be omitted. Case law dating up to 2020 is also available in HTML-only format through a partnership with the legal research service Fastcase.
The public release of CAP is likely the biggest step forward for free access to case law since Google incorporated court opinions into its Google Scholar search back in 2009. CAP fills in much of the historical case law that is omitted from Google Scholar, whose help page notes that state appellate cases date back generally to 1950, and most federal court cases back to 1923 (the U.S. Supreme Court back to 1791). CAP's digitization project dates back much farther, making CourtListener's Advanced Case Law Search a great place to begin a search of the free web for American court opinions.
Only time will tell what new projects and services will grow from the release of this data from commercial use restrictions, or how existing services might be enhanced by this body of case law. Some existing projects can be found on the Gallery section of the CAP site. In the meantime, add the CourtListener Advanced Case Law search to your research toolbox for access to free court opinions. For help locating other options for case law research, be sure to Ask a Librarian.
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