metadata

license: cc0-1.0
language:
  - en
tags:
  - united states
  - law
  - legal
  - court
  - opinions

Collaborative Open Legal Data (COLD) - Cases

Re-packaged bulk data from courtlistener.com, allowing for easy batch processing of open legal data, for example in the context of data science / AI experiments.

Prepared by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab in collaboration with the Free Law Project.

Summary

Formats
File structure
Data Dictionnary
Data Nutrition Label (DRAFT). (Archive).
Pipeline Source Code

Formats

We've released this data in two different formats:

JSON-L or JSON Lines

This format consists of a JSON document for every row in the dataset, one per line. This makes the data really easy to take a selection of the data or split it out into multiple files for parallel processing using ordinary command line tools such as head, split and jq.

Most JSON parsers are unable to easily stream through an enormous JSON array without loading the whole document in RAM or using more difficult APIs, so writing the data as an enormous JSON arrray would make it unwieldy.

Also, just about any language you can think of has a ready way to parse JSON data, which makes this version of the dataset more compatible.

See: https://jsonlines.org/

Apache Parquet

Parquet is binary format that makes filtering and retrieving the data quicker because it lays out the data in columns, which means columns that are unnecessary to satisfy a given query or workflow don't need to be read.

Parquet has more limited support outside the Python and JVM ecosystems, however.

See: https://parquet.apache.org/

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File structure

Both of these datasets were exported by the same system based on Apache Spark, so within each subdirectory, you'll find a similar list of files:

_SUCCESS: This indicates that the job that built the dataset ran successfully and therefore this is a complete dataset.
.json.gz or .gz.parquet: Each of these is a slice of the full dataset, encoded in JSON-L or Parquet, and compressed with GZip.
Hidden .crc files: These can be used to verify that the data transferred correctly and otherwise ignored.

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Data dictionary

Partial glossary of the fields in the data.

Field name	Description
`judges`	Names of judges presiding over the case, extracted from the text.
`date_filed`	Date the case was filed. Formatted in ISO Date format.
`date_filed_is_approximate`	Boolean representing whether or not the `date_filed` values are definitively correct.
`slug`	Short, human-readable unique string nickname for the case.
`case_name_short`	Short name for the case.
`case_name`	Fuller name for the case.
`case_name_full`	Full, formal name for the case.
`attorneys`	Names of attorneys arguing the case, extracted from the text.
`nature_of_suit`	Free text representinng ype of suit, such as Civil, Tort, etc.
`syllabus`	Summary of the questions addressed by the court in the decision.
`headnotes`	Textural headnotes of the case
`summary`	Textural summary of the case
`disposition`	How the court disposed of the case in their final ruling.
`history`	Textural information about what happened to this case in later decisions.
`other_dates`	Other dates related to the case in free text.
`cross_reference`	Citations to related cases.
`citation_count`	Number of cases that cite this one.
`precedential_status`	Constrainted to the values "Published", "Unknown", "Errata", "Unpublished", "Relating-to", "Separate", "In-chambers"
`citations`	Cases that cite this case.
`opinions`	An array of subrecords with the following fields:
`author_str`	Name of the author of an individual opinion
`per_curiam`	Boolean representing whether the opinion was delivered by an entire court or a single judge
`type`	One of "010combined", "015unamimous", "020lead", "025plurality", "030concurrence", "035concurrenceinpart", "040dissent", "050addendum", "060remittitur", "070rehearing", "080onthemerits", "090onmotiontostrike"
`opinion_text`	Actual full text of the opinion.
`ocr`	Whether or not the opinion was captured via optical character recognition.
`court_short_name`	Short name of court presiding over case.
`court_full_name`	Full name of court presiding over case.

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