Federal District Court Cases - http://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/

Hi All,

A few more free case law items... We have (1) added a database of 
Federal District Court Opinions (with full text search) and (2) added 
nice icons to the Federal District Courts' Case Filings where we have 
an opinion or order, and also added Judge/case-type pages. Add as 
always, lot's of RSS feeds.


1. US Federal District Court Opinions with Full Text Search

We have put online the Federal District Court case opinions and 
orders that are available using the opinion report in the Federal 
Courts' ECF. These are updated daily.

Here is the URL for the Federal District Court Opinions:

http://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/


CATEGORIZATION & RSS FEEDS - We have categorized the opinions by 
state, court, type of lawsuit and judge and combinations of judge and 
type of lawsuit. You can also subscribe to each of categories through 
RSS feeds to track a judge or court's decisions on different issues. 
And we also give the cause of action for each case.


FULL TEXT SEARCH - We are using Google's hosted Business Custom 
Search Engine (http://www.google.com/enterprise/csbe/) for the full 
text search. Google is now OCRing PDF image files, so even PDF files 
that have images of scanned documents will be in most cases full text 
indexable and searchable. Like the OCR of Google's Book Search. You 
will need to look at the cached copy to see the highlighted searched 
text though, and then find in the original PDF to be 100% that what 
you are reading is correct. Google should be doing a pretty good job 
of indexing and ocring these court decisions, although it may take a 
few days for a new document to show up in the index.

We allow one to search across all of the documents, or to limit the 
search to Federal District Courts in a particular state or an 
individual Federal District Court. You can also search by party name, 
court and filed date.

We currently have these opinions and orders since 2004 and will be 
including those from previous years in the next week or so (there are 
not many before 2004 in the ECF system).


DATA LIMITATIONS - This data set does NOT include all of the Federal 
District Court opinions.

	a. Not all of the courts have upgraded to ECF 2.4. So we do 
not have opinions for those courts that have not upgraded.

	b. Not all opinions and orders are included by the Judges. As 
is stated on the PACER site

"Written opinions have been defined by the Judicial Conference as 
'any document issued by a judge or judges of the court sitting in 
that capacity, that sets forth a reasoned explanation for a court's 
decision.' The responsibility for determining which documents meet 
this definition rests with the authoring judge."

Some judges have chosen not to include any of their opinions in the 
opinion report.

	c. Some scans of are such poor quality that the OCR failed.






2. Us Federal District Court Case Filings Updated with Nice Opinion Icons

We have also noted on the federal district court case filing database 
when we have a judge's opinion (you will see a little gavel :). The 
case filings are  at:

http://dockets.justia.com

And we have added browse pages and RSS feeds by judge. That should 
make it easier to find other cases a particular judge has ruled on 
that are covering similar issues (at least at the broad case type 
level). Then if we have the opinions or orders online, you can see 
what the judge wrote, or you may need to log into the court's ECF 
system and obtain the briefs and other filings (and pay a small per 
page fee).

The case filings and opinion databases are related, as they both have 
Federal Court data, it is just that the opinions database is limited 
to those cases where we have opinions.




There are some other free case law projects going on (featured cases 
with all filings, resource.org...), but more on those in a later 
posting to the list...

Now for the real important stuff... time to go check out those new 
touch ipods and video ipod nanos -  http://www.apple.com/ipod/  :)


Peace,

Tim



cross posted: NetLawyers and Law-Lib

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Timothy Stanley                         [email protected]
World Peace - Good Idea                 http://justia.com


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There is a read/write Web page with resources that will be linked there and used during the Seminar on PDFs for lawyers and legal applications:

http://Network-Lawyers.org/PDFLinks

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