Tag: court opinions

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How the US CCA generate PDFs

A real quick look at PDFs from the Circuit Courts reveals how the PDFs they release are generated.

  • 1st – Corel WordPerfect
  • 2nd – Microsoft Word
  • 3rd – Microsoft Word
  • 4th – Microsoft Word
  • 5th – Corel WordPerfect
  • 6th – ? not obvious from PDF meta data
  • 7th – Microsoft Word
  • 8th – Corel WordPerfect
  • 9th – Corel WordPerfect
  • 10th – Microsoft Word
  • 11th – Microsoft Word
  • DC – Adobe
  • Fed – Adobe

Information was obtained by simply downloading a recent PDF and looking at the properties of the file for creation information.

 

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CourtListener.com – US Fed Appellate Court Alerts and Yet Another Legal Search Engine

A mention in the BeSpecific blog tipped me off to an interesting project called CourtListener.com. From the about page:

The goal of the site is to create a free and competitive real time alert tool for the U.S. judicial system.

At present, the site has daily information regarding all precedential opinions issued by the 13 federal circuit courts and the Supreme Court of the United States. Each day, we also have the non-precedential opinions from all of the Circuit courts except the D.C. Circuit. This means that by 5:10pm PST, the database will be updated with the opinions of the day, with custom alerts going out shortly thereafter.

The site was created by Michael Lissner as a Masters thesis project at UC Berkley School of Information.

A quick perusal of the site and its associated documents tells us that Michael is using a scraping technique to visit court websites looking for recently released opinions. Once found, the opinions are retrieved, converted from PDF to text, indexed, and stored. Atom RSS feeds are then generated to provide current alerts.

The site is powered by Python using the Django web framework and is open source, so you can download the code. The backend database is MySQL and search is handled by Sphinx. The conversion from PDF appears to be plain text. If you register on the site you can create custom alerts based on saved searches.

All in all CourtListener.com provides another good source for current Federal appellate court opinions. Be sure to check the coverage page to see how far back the site goes for each court. Perhaps the future will bring an expansion to more courts and jurisdictions.

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Arkansas Becomes First State to Make Official Reports Electronic

“[The Arkansas Supreme Court] and the Court of Appeals will soon step into the future: effective July 1, 2009 the electronic version of appellate decisions posted on the Arkansas Judiciary website [link] will the official reports of those decisions. Arkansas will be the first state in the nation to publish and distribute the official report of its appellate decisions electronically.” In re: Arkansas Supreme Court and Court of Appeals Rule 5-2 (May 28, 2009).

Publication of the Arkansas Reports and Arkansas Appellate Reports will end with volume 375 Ark./104 Ark. App. Hat tip to Coleen Barger (UALR Bowen School of Law), Legal Writing Prof Blog.

via Law Librarian Blog: Stepping into the Future: Digital Versions of Arkansas Appellate Decisions Declared Official.

A most welcome development. While the linked announcement is a PDF of a scanned fax (yuk!), the opinions currently on the site are nice clean text-based PDF files and site boasts a page of RSS feeds that let you keep track of what is going on. Let’s hope this is fast moving trend.