From the about page:
Started as a part-time hobby in 2010, CourtListener is now a core project of the Free Law Project, a California Non-Profit corporation. The goal of the site is to provide powerful free legal tools for everybody while giving away all our data in bulk downloads.
We collect legal opinions from court websites and from data donations, and are aiming to have the best, most complete data on the open Web within the next couple years. We are slowly expanding to provide search and awareness tools for as many state courts as possible, and we already have tools for all of the Federal Appeals Courts. For more details on which jurisdictions we support, see our coverage page. If you’re able to help us acquire more cases, please get in touch.
This rather remarkable site has collected 905,842 court opinions as of September 24, 2013.
The default listing of cases is newest first but you can choose oldest first, most/least cited first and keyword relevance. Changing the listing order becomes interesting once you perform a keyword search (top search bar). The refinement (left hand side) works quite well, except that I could not filter search results by a judges name. On case names, separate the parties with “v.” as “vs” doesn’t work.
It is also possible to discover examples of changing legal terminology that impact your search results.
For example, try searching for the keyword phrase, “interstate commerce.” Now choose “Oldest first.” you will see Price v. Ralston (1790) and the next case is Crandall v. State of Nevada (1868). Hmmm, what happened to the early interstate commerce cases under John Marshall?
OK, so try “commerce.” Now set to “Oldest first.” Hmmm, a lot more cases. Yes? Under case name, type in “Gibbons” and press return. Now the top case is Gibbons v. Ogden (1824). The case name is a hyperlink so follow that now.
It is a long opinion by Chief Justice Marshall but at paragraph 5 he announces:
The power to regulate commerce extends to every species of commercial intercourse between the United States and foreign nations, and among the several States. It does not stop at the external boundary of a State.
The phrase “among the several States,” occurs 21 times in Gibbons v. Ogden, with no mention of the modern “interstate commerce.”
What we now call the “interstate commerce clause” played a major role in the New Deal legislation that ended the 1930’s depression in the United States. See Commerce Clause. Following the cases cited under “New Deal” will give you an interesting view of the conflicting sides. A conflict that still rages today.
The terminology problem, “among the several states” vs. “interstate commerce” is one that makes me doubt the efficacy of public access to law programs. Short of knowing the “right” search words, it is unlikely you would have found Gibbons v. Ogden. Well, short of reading through the entire corpus of Supreme Court decisions. 😉
Public access to law would be enhanced with mappings such as “interstate commerce,” and “among the several states,” but also distinguishing “due process,” didn’t always mean what it means today, and further mappings to colloquial search expressions.
A topic map could capture those nuances and many more.
I guess the question is whether people should be free to search for the law or should they be freed by finding the law?