Legal / law database

[Joseph Turian]

Does anyone have a legal / law database?
I want to experiment with some text analysis techniques.

Best,
Jsoeph

[Brendan O'Connor]

Joseph, do you mean, a database of legal text documents, like law reviews, case law, judicial opinions, and the like?

Brendan

--
http://anyall.org - Brendan O'Connor
m.s. student, language technology, carnegie mellon university

[Jonathan Gray]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 5:55 AM, Joseph Turian<tur...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Does anyone have a legal / law database?
> I want to experiment with some text analysis techniques.

There are a few things at:

http://ckan.net/tag/read/law
http://ckan.net/tag/read/legal

Is this the kind of thing you mean?

--
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org

[Joseph Turian]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Brendan O'Connor<bren...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Joseph, do you mean, a database of legal text documents, like law reviews,
> case law, judicial opinions, and the like?

Yes

[Aaron Swartz]

>> Joseph, do you mean, a database of legal text documents, like law reviews,
>> case law, judicial opinions, and the like?
>
> Yes

http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/

[Brendan O'Connor]

I think everyone in the legal field pays up to either WestLaw or Lexis-Nexis for this.  Yikes.  If you can get those, there's fairly nice plain-text version to be had given enough scraping trickery.  Sometimes universities have access; though outside law schools it's sometimes a more limited version.

Some things are definitely available for free though.  I once saw a website with lots of Sup Court opinions but can't find it any more.  Findlaw.com seems to have some (non-pdf, yay) of them for free. http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/supreme.html  But it's hard to tell what costs or not.

Brendan

[Brendan O'Connor]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 11:59 AM, Brendan O'Connor <bren...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think everyone in the legal field pays up to either WestLaw or Lexis-Nexis for this.  Yikes.  If you can get those, there's fairly nice plain-text version to be had given enough scraping trickery.  Sometimes universities have access; though outside law schools it's sometimes a more limited version.

By the way, if it wasn't obvious already, I think the best way to find out is to ask a law student!  I haven't done this myself for a while, so my information might be out of date.

Brendan

[Poeter]

Findlaw is run by WestLaw, so the terms of service may prohibit what
you want to do.

Altlaw is your best bet for case law. Altlaw incorporates the cases
available at resources.org. Their goal is to become the repository of
free case law.


On Aug 13, 9:01 am, "Brendan O'Connor" <breno...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 11:59 AM, Brendan O'Connor <breno...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> > I think everyone in the legal field pays up to either WestLaw or
> > Lexis-Nexis for this.  Yikes.  If you can get those, there's fairly nice
> > plain-text version to be had given enough scraping trickery.  Sometimes
> > universities have access; though outside law schools it's sometimes a more
> > limited version.
>
> By the way, if it wasn't obvious already, I think the best way to find out
> is to ask a law student!  I haven't done this myself for a while, so my
> information might be out of date.
>
> Brendan
>

> --http://anyall.org- Brendan O'Connor

[Poeter]

Lastly, if you care, the people for altlaw reside on the lawcommons-
dev google group, and there is another more general group on free case
law at the Open Case Law google group.

> > --http://anyall.org-Brendan O'Connor

[Stuart Sierra]

Hi, thanks for the plug, Poeter. http://www.altlaw.org/ has a search
interface to most of the federal circuit and supreme cases currently
available. I'm collecting more, see the discussion at http://lawcommons.org/
and the bulk downloads at http://bulk.altlaw.org/

And feel free to send any questions to the lawcommons-dev Google
group.

-Stuart Sierra

> > --http://anyall.org-Brendan O'Connor