Free Law Project

Free Law Project is a United States federal 501(c)(3) Oakland-based nonprofit that provides free access to primary legal materials, develops legal research tools, and supports academic research on legal corpora. Free Law Project has several initiatives that collect and share legal information, including the largest collection of American oral argument audio, 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. Free Law Project was founded in 2013 by Michael Lissner and Brian Carver. Initiatives Free Law Project has a number of initiatives, including: CourtListener.com, which provides a searchable and API-accessible website with court dockets, 900,000 minutes of oral argument recordings, more than eight thousand judges, and more than three million opinions. All of the opinions on Court Listener are interlinked by a citator, and the graph of citations is available via an API. RECAP Project, which allows users to automatically search for free copies of documents during a search in the fee-based online US legal database PACER, creating a free alternative database at the Internet Archive and Court Listener. Judge and Appointer Database, which provides biographical and electoral information about more than 8,000 American judges and appointors. Database of Reporters, which provides information about more than 400 legal reporters. Courts-DB, which provides information about more than 700 US courts. All of Free Law Project's work is open source and available online. RECAP RECAP 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. It was created in 2009 by a team from Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy and Harvard University's Berkman Center, and is now maintained as part of the Free Law Project. The name "RECAP" derives from "PACER", spelled backward.