Free Law Project has a number of initiatives, including:
CourtListener.com,[7] 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,[8] 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 16,000 American judges and appointors. [9]
Database of Reporters, which provides information about more than 400 legal reporters.
Courts-DB, which provides information about more than 700 US courts.[10] All of Free Law Project's work is open source and available online.
RECAP is available as a Mozilla Firefoxadd-on, Google Chrome extension, and Safari extension.[14] For each PACER document, the software will first check if it has already been uploaded by another user. If no free version exists and the user purchases the document from PACER, it will automatically upload a copy to the RECAP server, thereby building the database.[12] The original RECAP implementation uploaded documents to the Internet Archive; as of late 2017, the Free Law Project version now uploads documents to the Free Law Project, with a promise to mirror that data to the Internet Archive on a quarterly basis.[15]
PACER continued charging per page fees after the introduction of RECAP.[16]
Prior to the creation of RECAP, activist Aaron Swartz set up an automatic download from an official library entry point to PACER.
Swartz downloaded 2.7 million documents, all public domain, representing less than 1 percent of the documents in PACER.[17] These public domain documents were later uploaded to RECAP and made available to the public for free.
However, the automated downloading triggered a government investigation. No criminal charges were filed, because PACER had provided lawful access and the documents copied were in the public domain, and the case was closed.
Some courts have acknowledged RECAP's free distribution of documents. A small handful of PACER users receive fee-exempt access (fee waivers are granted on a district-by-district basis), and a condition of the fee waiver generally requires that fee exempt users not further distribute documents they receive under the waiver, pursuant to Judicial Conference policy.[18] Some courts such as the District Court for the District of Massachusetts display a prominent reminder on its ECF page: "fee exempt PACER users must refrain from the use of RECAP".[19]
^Kate Linebaugh (October 1, 2021). "The Federal Law That 138 Judges Have Broken". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved November 25, 2021. this guy out in Oakland .. works for this nonprofit called the Free Law Project .. project going on for several years, to obtain from the administrative office of the courts, every financial disclosure for every federal judge, and digitize it.
^"Judge and Disclosure Database". Free Law Project. Archived from the original on January 22, 2024. Retrieved March 14, 2024. The database contains information about more than sixteen thousand state and federal judges, making it a treasure trove for those wishing to do judicial analytics.
CourtListener provides free access to federal court documents that someone has already purchased for RECAP / CourtListener and invites users to purchase a copy of others for CourtListener / RECAP.
