![]() Free Law Project Logo | |
Abbreviation | FLP |
---|---|
Formation | 2013-09-24 |
Founders | Michael Lissner, Brian Carver |
Founded at | Emeryville, CA |
Type | 501(c)(3) |
46-3342480 | |
Registration no. | C3594588 |
Legal status | Charity |
Headquarters | Oakland, CA |
Services | CourtListener, RECAP, Bots.law |
Executive Director | Michael Lissner |
Michael Lissner, Brian Carver, Ansel Halliburton | |
Website | free |
Free Law Project is a United States federal 501(c)(3) Oakland-based [1] nonprofit that provides free access to primary legal materials, develops legal research tools, and supports academic research on legal corpora. [2] Free Law Project has several initiatives that collect and share legal information, including the largest [3] collection of American oral argument audio, [4] daily collection of new legal opinions from 200 United States courts and administrative bodies, the RECAP Project, which collects documents from PACER, and user-generated Supreme Court citation visualizations. Their data helped The Wall Street Journal expose 138 cases of conflict of interest cases regarding violations by federal judges. [3] [5]
Free Law Project was founded in 2013 by Michael Lissner and Brian Carver. [6]
Free Law Project has a number of initiatives, including:
RECAP [11] is software which allows users to automatically search for free copies of documents during a search in the fee-based online U.S. federal court document database PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), and to help build up a free alternative database. [12] It was created in 2009 by a team from Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy and Harvard University's Berkman Center, [11] and is now maintained as part of the Free Law Project. The name "RECAP" derives from "PACER", spelled backward. [13]
RECAP is available as a Mozilla Firefox add-on, Google Chrome extension, and Safari extension. [14] For each PACER document, the software will first check if it has already been uploaded by another user. If no free version exists and the user purchases the document from PACER, it will automatically upload a copy to the RECAP server, thereby building the database. [12] The original RECAP implementation uploaded documents to the Internet Archive; as of late 2017, the Free Law Project version now uploads documents to the Free Law Project, with a promise to mirror that data to the Internet Archive on a quarterly basis. [15]
PACER continued charging per page fees after the introduction of RECAP. [16]
Prior to the creation of RECAP, activist Aaron Swartz set up an automatic download from an official library entry point to PACER.
Swartz downloaded 2.7 million documents, all public domain, representing less than 1 percent of the documents in PACER. [17] These public domain documents were later uploaded to RECAP and made available to the public for free.
However, the automated downloading triggered a government investigation. No criminal charges were filed, because PACER had provided lawful access and the documents copied were in the public domain, and the case was closed.
Some courts have acknowledged RECAP's free distribution of documents. A small handful of PACER users receive fee-exempt access (fee waivers are granted on a district-by-district basis), and a condition of the fee waiver generally requires that fee exempt users not further distribute documents they receive under the waiver, pursuant to Judicial Conference policy. [18] Some courts such as the District Court for the District of Massachusetts display a prominent reminder on its ECF page: "fee exempt PACER users must refrain from the use of RECAP". [19]
CourtListener [6] [20] is an open source software project to archive and host court documents.
In legal terminology, a complaint is any formal legal document that sets out the facts and legal reasons that the filing party or parties believes are sufficient to support a claim against the party or parties against whom the claim is brought that entitles the plaintiff(s) to a remedy. For example, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) that govern civil litigation in United States courts provide that a civil action is commenced with the filing or service of a pleading called a complaint. Civil court rules in states that have incorporated the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure use the same term for the same pleading.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA) is a United States cybersecurity bill that was enacted in 1986 as an amendment to existing computer fraud law, which had been included in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Prior to computer-specific criminal laws, computer crimes were prosecuted as mail and wire fraud, but the applying law was often insufficient.
The E-Government Act of 2002, is a United States statute enacted on 17 December 2002, with an effective date for most provisions of 17 April 2003. Its stated purpose is to improve the management and promotion of electronic government services and processes by establishing a Federal Chief Information Officer within the Office of Management and Budget, and by establishing a framework of measures that require using Internet-based information technology to improve citizen access to government information and services, and for other purposes.
Aaron Hillel Swartz was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. As a programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS; the technical architecture for Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to creating copyright licenses; the website framework web.py; and the lightweight markup language format Markdown. Swartz was involved in the development of the social news aggregation website Reddit until he departed from the company in 2007. He is often credited as a martyr and a prodigy, and his work focused on civic awareness and activism.
Carl Malamud is an American technologist, author, and public domain advocate, known for his foundation Public.Resource.Org. He founded the Internet Multicasting Service. During his time with this group, he was responsible for developing the first Internet radio station, for putting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database on-line, and for creating the Internet 1996 World Exposition.
The Electronic Filing System is the Singapore Judiciary's electronic platform for filing and service of documents within the litigation process. In addition, it provides the registries of the Supreme Court and the Subordinate Courts with an electronic registry and workflow system; and an electronic case file. Recent enhancements have added a module which facilitates the conduct of hearing using documents that have been electronically filed.
PACER is an electronic public access service for United States federal court documents. It allows authorized users to obtain case and docket information from the United States district courts, United States courts of appeals, and United States bankruptcy courts. The system is managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts in accordance with the policies of the Judicial Conference, headed by the Chief Justice of the United States. As of 2013, it holds more than 500 million documents.
A docket in the United States is the official summary of proceedings in a court of law. In the United Kingdom in modern times it is an official document relating to delivery of something, with similar meanings to these two elsewhere. In the late nineteenth century the term referred to a large folio book in which clerks recorded all filings and court proceedings for each case, although use has been documented since 1485.
The British and Irish Legal Information Institute provides legal information, and especially reports of cases decided by courts, in the United Kingdom generally and the Republic of Ireland. Decisions from England and Wales, the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, the European Union, and from the European Court of Human Rights, are put online. It is a partial online database of British and Irish legislation, case law, law reform reports, treaties and some legal scholarship.
CM/ECF is the case management and electronic court filing system for most of the United States federal courts. PACER, an acronym for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, is an interface to the same system for public use.
A copyfraud is a false copyright claim by an individual or institution with respect to content that is in the public domain. Such claims are unlawful, at least under US and Australian copyright law, because material that is not copyrighted is free for all to use, modify and reproduce. Copyfraud also includes overreaching claims by publishers, museums and others, as where a legitimate copyright owner knowingly, or with constructive knowledge, claims rights beyond what the law allows.
Legal research is the process of identifying and retrieving information to support legal arguments and decisions. Finding relevant legal information can be challenging and may involve the use of electronic research tools as well as printed books and materials. However, many resources that are useful for legal research are fee-based, and many are not easily accessible.
Pro se legal representation means to argue on one's own behalf in a legal proceeding, as a defendant or plaintiff in civil cases, or a defendant in criminal cases, rather than have representation from counsel or an attorney.
Public.Resource.Org (PRO) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation dedicated to publishing and sharing public domain materials in the United States and internationally. It was founded by Carl Malamud and is based in Sebastopol, California.
EPIC v. Department of Justice is a 2014 case in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia between the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) where EPIC seeks court action to enforce their Freedom of Information Act request for documents that the Department of Justice has withheld pertaining to George W. Bush's authorization of NSA warrantless surveillance.
Authors Guild v. Google 804 F.3d 202 was a copyright case heard in federal court for the Southern District of New York, and then the Second Circuit Court of Appeals between 2005 and 2015. It concerned fair use in copyright law and the transformation of printed copyrighted books into an online searchable database through scanning and digitization. It centered on the legality of the Google Book Search Library Partner project that had been launched in 2003.
A notice of electronic filing (NEF) is part of the system established by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts through the docketing and access systems of PACER & CM/ECF. PACER is a public-access system accessible by any person after registration and for a fee. CM/ECF is the Case Management/Electronic Court Filing system, available only to those admitted to a particular U.S. District or U.S. Court of Appeals. The NEF provides a record of service of an electronically filed document by parties, or of service of the electronically filed orders and judgments of the courts, upon attorneys in the case and the court. For such parties, the NEF has replaced the traditional service via US Mail or other "paper" methods. (Figures 1, 2)
In United States of America v. Aaron Swartz, Aaron Swartz, an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist, was prosecuted for multiple violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA), after downloading academic journal articles through the MIT computer network from a source (JSTOR) for which he had an account as a Harvard research fellow. Federal prosecutors eventually charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, charges carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines plus 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release. Facing trial and the possibility of imprisonment, Swartz committed suicide, and the case was consequently dismissed.
The law of Texas is derived from the Constitution of Texas and consists of several levels, including constitutional, statutory, regulatory law, as well as case law and local laws and regulations.
Legal technology, also known as Legal Tech, refers to the use of technology and software to provide legal services and support the legal industry. Legal Tech companies are often startups founded with the purpose of disrupting the traditionally conservative legal market.
this guy out in Oakland .. works for this nonprofit called the Free Law Project .. project going on for several years, to obtain from the administrative office of the courts, every financial disclosure for every federal judge, and digitize it.
The Free Law Project, a new California nonprofit, launched Tuesday and will provide free and easy access to legal material and research for anyone to download.
The database contains information about more than sixteen thousand state and federal judges, making it a treasure trove for those wishing to do judicial analytics.