Generative AI offers a defining moment where information archives gain the ability to answer questions about themselves; to act without human intervention; and even to simulate the processes that created them. From our perspective at the lab - where we bring library principles to technological frontiers - anyone who is concerned with information, access, and the law should be aware of and feel empowered to influence the use of generative AIs. We have embarked upon a series of projects in support of that belief. This is one example:
COLD Cases is a research data set for the open law community.
The legal nonprofit Free Law Project maintains a wide variety of web crawlers to collect and publish an ever-growing data set of public domain law at CourtListener.com.
We have collaborated with FLP to release COLD Cases as a data set suitable for machine learning available on HuggingFace along with a Data Nutrition Label which explains the source of the data and gives guidelines for ethical use. The result is information about over 8 million court cases available for batch processing in the context of data science, AI experiments, and legal tool building.