Access Limits

All metadata files, and bulk data files for our open jurisdictions, are available to everyone without a login.

Bulk data files for the remaining jurisdictions are available to research scholars who sign a research agreement. You can request a research agreement by creating an account and then visiting your account page.

See our About page for details on our data access restrictions.

Downloading

You can download bulk data manually from our website, or use the manifest.csv file to select URLs to download programmatically.

When downloading bulk files, you may find that the download times out on the largest files. In that case, use wget, which retries when it encounters a network problem. Here's an example for the U.S. file with case body in text format:

wget --header="Authorization: Token your-api-token" "//case.law/download/bulk_exports/latest/by_jurisdiction/case_text_restricted/us_text.zip"

Because this is a restricted file it requires an Authorization header. Replace your-api-token with your API token from the user details page.

API Equivalence

Each file that we offer for download is equivalent to a particular query to our API. For example, the file ill_text.zip contains all cases that would be returned by an API query with full_case=true&jurisdiction=ill&body_format=text. We offer files for each possible jurisdiction value and each possible reporter value, combined with body_format=text, body_format=xml, and plain metadata-only export.

The JSON objects returned by the API and in bulk files differ only in that bulk JSON objects do not include "url" fields, which can be reconstructed from object IDs.

Data Format

Bulk data files are provided as zipped directories. Each directory is in BagIt format, with a layout like this:

.
├── bag-info.txt
├── bagit.txt
├── data/
│   └── data.jsonl.xz
└── manifest-sha512.txt

Because the zip file provides no additional compression, we recommend uncompressing it for convenience and keeping the uncompressed directory on disk.

Caselaw data is stored within the data/data.jsonl.xz file. The .jsonl.xz suffix indicates that the file is compressed with xzip, and is a text file where each line represents a JSON object.

Using Bulk Data

The data.jsonl.xz file can be unzipped using third-party GUI programs like The Unarchiver (Mac) or 7-zip (Windows), or from the command line with a command like unxz -k data/data.jsonl.xz.

However, this increases the disk space needed by about 500%, and in most cases is unnecessary. Instead we recommend interacting directly with the compressed files.

To read the file from the command line, run:

xzcat data/data.jsonl.xz | less

If you install jq you can get nicely formatted output ...

xzcat data/data.jsonl.xz | jq | less

... or run more sophisticated queries. For example, to extract the name of each case:

xzcat data/data.jsonl.xz | jq .name | less

You can also interact directly with the compressed files from code. The following example prints the name of each case using Python:

import lzma, json
with lzma.open("data/data.jsonl.xz") as in_file:
    for line in in_file:
        case = json.loads(str(line, 'utf8'))
        print(case['name'])

To load the compressed data file into an R data frame, do something like this:

> install.packages("jsonlite")
> library(jsonlite)
> ark <- stream_in(xzfile("Arkansas-20190416-text/data/data.jsonl.xz"))

Other repositories

You can also explore our Illinois Public Bulk Data on Harvard Dataverse and Kaggle.

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Bulk Data