What is LawCommons.org?

LawCommons.org is first and foremost a place to house a freely available collection of federal case law obtained from court websites.

LawCommons.org is also used to feed raw cases into AltLaw.org, the free caselaw search engine.

Finally, LawCommons.org hopes to become a community of researchers interested in sharing questions, answers, and discussions about ideas, tools, and techniques for obtaining, manipulating, and analyzing legal texts of all kinds.

How is LawCommons.org related to AltLaw.org? How are they different?

The two sites are closely related. First and most fundamentally, LawCommons feeds cases into AltLaw.org.

AltLaw is about making the best possible freely-available search engine for case law (and maybe other legal texts someday). Like LawCommons, AltLaw supports a community of developers who are helping build the service into the most useful service possible. The source code for AltLaw is hosted here at LawCommons, as well as the scripts used to download all the cases.

In contrast, LawCommons may encompass on all sorts of problems, even those unrelated to the task of searching case law. For example, citation studies that analyze the network of citations between cases could be a LawCommons project. As another example, Mitu Gulati's attempt to distinguish judges who write their own opinions versus those who defer more to clerks would have made a great LawCommons project.

How can I get involved?

Take a look at our ToDo list for a list of tasks for which we are seeking help.

Then volunteer on the MailingLists to let us know what you want to work on.