The Library Innovation Lab hosted Transform: Justice at the Harvard Law School on March 8, 2024. A celebration of the full, unqualified release of the data from the Caselaw Access Project was the anchor of a gathering focused on the future of the access to law movement. Speakers across government, academia, and industry sketched out the opportunities ahead of us for expanding access to legal data and its waterfall effects across society and justice.

The Caselaw Access Project

The Caselaw Access Project scanned the entirety of the Harvard Law School Library’s physical collection of American case law and made it machine-readable in a consistent format available online. This process was funded in part by an industry partner who worked with us for the first few years post-digitization to provide access to the data to researchers and the public, rather than other commercial entities. To facilitate that agreement, the Library Innovation Lab maintained case.law as the primary access point for the data in order to bring the corpus to researchers and the general public.

Learn more about the Caselaw Access Project’s story in this video we made to celebrate.

Transform: Justice was, in part, a celebration of the full, unqualified release of the Caselaw Access Project data. Now that there is no need for metered access to the corpus, in order to create more room for our team to do exploratory work, and to consolidate efforts, we’ve transitioned case.law to a static state and started partnerships with other organizations in the open legal data space to shepherd this data into its next phase. Thank you to the Free Law Project for all your support and collaboration.

Event Recordings

This event was live streamed and partially recorded. You can find videos of the program on Harvard Law School’s Youtube channel.

Media Coverage

  • “Access to law is foundational to the broader goal of access to justice” from Harvard Law Today.
  • “Event Tomorrow Marks the End of Commercial Restrictions on the Caselaw Access Project that Digitized All U.S. Case Law” from LawSites.
  • “Harvard Law Releases 40M Pages of Digitzed Caselaw” from Law360.

Contacts

If you have questions regarding the event please reach out to Clare Stanton.