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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖
@free.law
14K followers 62 following 4.1K posts
We are the non-profit host of RECAP, CourtListener, and the Big Cases bots. We use technology and advocacy to make the legal sector better. https://free.law | https://free.law/recap/ | https://courtlistener.com | https://bots.law
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · Jun 18
News! CourtListener now lets you keep up with everything that's happening in PACER. Save a query to CourtListener, and we'll tell you when there are new results.

RECAP Search Alerts are finally live!

Follow people, organizations, topics, and anything else you can imagine. Learn how below: 👇
A picture showing how to make an alert: 1. Do a search in the RECAP Archive 2. Click the bell icon in the query bar. 3. A modal pops up where you can edit the details for the alert (give it a name, set the timing, etc.)
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Reposted by Free Law Project ⚖
suffolklitlab.org
Suffolk LIT Lab @suffolklitlab.org · 20h
🚨 Cool Job Alert! 🚨 Are you a DevOps engineer? We're looking¹ for someone to help scale our open-source access to justice work.² Not a DevOps engineer? I bet you can repost this to someone who is.

¹ jobs.jobvite.com/suffolkunive... job listing
² www.youtube.com/watch?v=AECH... sample of what we do
Suffolk University is looking for DevOps Engineer, Legal Innovation and Technology Lab – Clinical Fellow (Remote).
Suffolk University is looking for DevOps Engineer, Legal Innovation and Technology Lab – Clinical Fellow (Remote). Learn more or Jobvite a friend.
jobs.jobvite.com
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 3d
Which time stamp are you referring to? It's a complex topic, but we usually show the timezone in our UI.
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Reposted by Free Law Project ⚖
courtwatch.bsky.social
Court Watch @courtwatch.bsky.social · 5d
Exclusive: Chief Justice “Stonewalls Congress" on PACER Hack, Senator Says

The Courts sidestep a congressional request for independent review. Post-hack procedures have significantly reduced transparency in the judicial system.

www.courtwatch.news/p/exclusive-...
Exclusive: Chief Justice “Stonewalls Congress" on PACER Hack, Senator Says
The Courts sidestep a congressional request for independent review. Post-hack procedures have significantly reduced transparency in the judicial system.
www.courtwatch.news
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 5d
Our director, @michaeljaylissner.com, was awarded the Paul H. Chapman Award for his leadership of Free Law Project, and for the organization's "unique improvements to the civil or criminal justice systems."

Here are the details and his acceptance speech: free.law/2025/09/10/0...
Free Law Project Director Michael Lissner Awarded for Work Improving Justice
Our Executive Director was given the Paul H. Chapman award for his work improving justice in America.
free.law
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 5d
CourtListener has powerful search alerts for federal court data. Here's how our director uses the feature to monitor litigation, SCOTUS, and more: free.law/2025/06/24/h...
How I use RECAP Search Alerts for PACER Data
RECAP Search Alerts make it easy to monitor the federal courts. This is how our director uses the system.
free.law
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 5d
On Monday we and other legal tech orgs filed a brief in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS arguing that headnotes aren't copyrightable and that ROSS's use was fair. Here's our write up: free.law/2025/10/02/t...
Free Law Project and Legal Tech Innovators File Amicus Brief in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS
We and other legal technology providers filed an amicus brief in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence. It's simple: Headnotes cannot be copyrighted and ROSS's use was fair.
free.law
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 6d
We're a growing organization, and donations like these really make a huge difference in what we can get done. Our server fees are now around $1000 per day.

Please consider becoming a member so we can do more advocacy and work: donate.free.law/forms/member...
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 6d
Free Law Project just launched the Justice Partner Circle — a new way for law firms to support open access to law & shape the future of legal tech.

Join to back innovation, advance access to justice, and demonstrate commitment to transparency & the public good.

Learn more: free.law/2025/09/30/j...
Announcing the Justice Partner Circle: Partnering with Law Firms to Advance Legal Innovation
Introducing the Justice Partner Circle: a new initiative for law firms to lead on access to justice, shape the future of legal practice, and harness FLP’s open-source legal tools. Members can get expe...
free.law
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Reposted by Free Law Project ⚖
free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 8d
Right now there are no free citators, AI or otherwise, creating a huge gap in legal research. The goal of this project is to build an AI citator that says what's good and bad law, and to prove that it is trustworthy by comparing it to a ground truth benchmark made by attorneys.
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Reposted by Free Law Project ⚖
free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 8d
We've made tremendous progress building a benchmark for AI citators. We now have more than 7,500 data points and are about 70% done.

To complete the job, we need about a dozen more attorneys to help analyze decisions. Please boost and let us know if you can help! Thank you! free.law/2025/09/30/c...
Citator Expert Annotation Project: A Status Update and Call for Help
With an overwhelming response from the legal community, we're in the home stretch of curating the data for building the first open-source AI-powered legal citator—and we need your help to cross the fi...
free.law
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 8d
Right now there are no free citators, AI or otherwise, creating a huge gap in legal research. The goal of this project is to build an AI citator that says what's good and bad law, and to prove that it is trustworthy by comparing it to a ground truth benchmark made by attorneys.
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 8d
We've made tremendous progress building a benchmark for AI citators. We now have more than 7,500 data points and are about 70% done.

To complete the job, we need about a dozen more attorneys to help analyze decisions. Please boost and let us know if you can help! Thank you! free.law/2025/09/30/c...
Citator Expert Annotation Project: A Status Update and Call for Help
With an overwhelming response from the legal community, we're in the home stretch of curating the data for building the first open-source AI-powered legal citator—and we need your help to cross the fi...
free.law
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Reposted by Free Law Project ⚖
lawlib.lclark.edu
Boley Law Library @lawlib.lclark.edu · 8d
In amicus briefs, @eff.org, @archive.org, @free.law, @amlibraryassoc.bsky.social, and more argue that headnote summaries of judicial opinions are not copyrightable, or at the least that fair use applies www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...
Protecting Access to the Law—and Beneficial Uses of AI
As the first copyright cases concerning AI reach appeals courts, EFF wants to protect important, beneficial uses of this technology—including AI for legal research. That’s why we weighed in on the lon...
www.eff.org
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 9d
… @arl.org, @archive.org, @publicknowledge.bsky.social, Public.Resource.Org, and Heather Meeker.

All briefs are here: www.courtlistener.com/docket/70622...
Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH v. Ross Intelligence Inc, 25-2153 - CourtListener.com
Docket for Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH v. Ross Intelligence Inc, 25-2153 — Brought to you by Free Law Project, a non-profit dedicated to creating high quality open legal information.
www.courtlistener.com
free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 9d
More briefs are landing, including @eff.org, @authorsalliance.bsky.social, @brianlfrye.bsky.social, @rtushnet.bsky.social, @pamelasamuelson.bsky.social, Edward Lee, Christopher Jon Sprigman, @ccianet.bsky.social, @progresschamber.org, @netchoice.bsky.social, @amlibraryassoc.bsky.social …
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 9d
The following organizations deserve much credit for joining this brief: Cicerai, Dispute Resolution AI, Juristai, Paxton AI, and Trellis Research.

We could have never done it without the help of @prmalone.bsky.social and August Gebhard-Koenigstein at the @juelsgaardclinic.bsky.social at Stanford.
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 9d
Today we and other legal technology providers¹ filed² an amicus brief in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence.

It's simple: Headnotes cannot be copyrighted and ROSS's use was fair. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

—
¹˒ ² See below for these excellent orgs and those that helped!
A screenshot from the summary of the argument in the PDF: “[N]o one can own the law. ‘Every citizen is presumed to know the law,’ and ‘it needs no argument to show . . . that all should have free access’ to its contents.” Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255, 265, (2020) (citation omitted). So too for judicial opinions. Id. (“[Judges] cannot be the ‘author[s]’ of the works they prepare ‘in the discharge of their judicial duties.’”). The same should be true of the headnotes at issue in this case, which serve a discrete and limited purpose as often near-verbatim summaries and verbatim quotes that faithfully and accurately describe a specific point of law from a judicial opinion. Individual headnotes are uncopyrightable because they lack the originality required for copyright protection, and the district court erred in finding to the contrary. And, because there are no or only a few other ways to concisely and precisely express the specific individual legal points stated in an opinion, the expression in a headnote cannot be distinguished from the underlying legal idea it aims to convey. The district court therefore also erred by rejecting the merger defense. Another screenshot: But even if headnotes like those in Westlaw’s platform were copyrightable, the district court erred in concluding on summary judgment that Appellant ROSS Intelligence’s indirect use of those headnotes as inputs to train a new artificial intelligence (AI) legal research tool was not fair use. Instead, a correct application 2of the four fair use factors should have concluded that ROSS’s use was highly transformative and would not serve as a market substitute for headnotes. A third: The district court came to that conclusion after analogizing the headnote author’s editorial judgment “to that of a sculptor.” D.E. 770 at 7. The court’s logic is: just as a sculptor takes an uncopyrightable block of marble and creates copyrightable expression by choosing what to cut away and what to leave in place, Appellees’ Westlaw creates protectable expression by taking a court opinion and “identifying which words matter and chiseling away the surrounding mass.” Id. The sculpture analogy, however, crumbles upon closer inspection. Its most fundamental flaw is the notion that a court opinion is somehow equivalent to an untouched, blank block of marble. Not so. The more accurate analogy is that a judicial opinion is the final product of a judge taking a block of marble and carefully, skillfully chiseling away the surrounding mass to create a host of precise details, each of which reveal a specific point of law or fact. The resulting opinion looks nothing like the initial block of marble; it is instead a highly sculpted work made up entirely of many discrete bits of expressive (but uncopyrightable) content that are very directly tailored to the specific case.2
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 9d
Our last milestone in this series is live. In under a year, we've served over 100-million API requests. This number is a huge validation for our work. The people are hungry for legal information. We're thrilled to be dishing it up! free.law/2025/09/29/o...
Summer Stats: CourtListener API Surpasses 100 Million Requests
Since its release last fall, CourtListener’s v4 API has processed more than 100 million requests. Developers and organizations are building research tools, civic projects, and legal technology on top ...
free.law
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 13d
Thank you. We get a lot of push back on anything AI. This is us taking a very measured approach rather than throwing spaghetti on the wall. 🍝
free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 13d
This work was exploratory and revelatory. We learned a lot about what works and what doesn't, and our next step is scale on this work and build these systems.
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 13d
This work was made possible by @arnoldventures.bsky.social.

We looked into semantic search, AI summarization, categorization, automated metadata extraction, how to build a AI citator and more.
A screenshot from the blog post listing the experiments we ran.
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 13d
Alongside @umichlaw.bsky.social, we spent six months analyzing the ways AI could fit into CourtListener and the Civil Litigation Clearinghouse. The goal was to see how AI could make our systems smarter, faster, and more accessible. Read the outcomes here: free.law/2025/09/25/c...
Opening Doors with AI: How Free Law Project and the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse Are Reimagining Legal Research
Exploring how AI can unlock court data, we partnered with the Clearinghouse to look at ways to make legal research smarter, faster, and more accessible.
free.law
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 13d
Hi Kathleen, that's a good idea. We keep working to clean off the bad entries, but it's a tough job. For now we don't have more enhancements to P&P planned, but that seems like the clear next step.
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 14d
Here's the next in our "Summer Stats" series. Earlier this summer, we got over one million visitors in a week. Our normal is now 500k visitors per week. free.law/2025/09/25/o...
Summer Stats: CourtListener Serves Over 1 Million Visitors in a Week
Earlier this summer, CourtListener welcomed more than 1 million visitors in a single week for the first time. This milestone highlights the growing demand for open and reliable access to court data.
free.law
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free.law
Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 14d
This is your quarterly reminder to use your free $30 PACER credits if you haven't already. Here's a list of the top documents people want: www.courtlistener.com/prayers/top/
A graphic that says: Most Wanted PACER Documents Don't forget to use your credits This is your quarterly reminder to check your PACER balance, and purchase documents for others."
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