Expanding Access to U.S. Law: Harvard's Caselaw Access Project

"For more than six years a team at Harvard University Law School’s Library Innovation Lab has been busy working on the Caselaw Access Project (CAP), an initiative to digitize a collection of 360 years worth of United States court cases dating from 1658 to 2018. The project was initiated in an effort to make case law freely and easily available to legal scholars and the public. Last month, the fruits of the team’s labors were realized with the official launch of CAP. The published CAP corpus comprises 6.4 million unique cases and over 40 million pages of U.S. federal, state, and territorial case law documents from the Law School library.

CAP was funded and made possible by Harvard Law School and, in part, through a partnership with legal research and analytics startup Ravel. The new digital repository will help lower the cost of accessing historical court cases and it opens up new opportunities for legal scholars and programmers to process large sets of legal data via the CAP API and bulk data service. The CAP API enables users to browse and download cases using a few short commands and through its “bulk data” feature users can download whole zip files of content.

In the interview below, Kelly Fitzpatrick, Research Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, discusses how CAP got started and the goals of the project...."