About & Mission

Our Mission

Free Law Project is a California non-profit public benefit corporation and a federally-recognized 501(c)(3) public charity whose specific purposes are primarily:

• To provide free, public, and permanent access to primary legal materials on the Internet for educational, charitable, and scientific purposes to the benefit of the general public and the public interest;
• To develop, implement, and provide public access to technologies useful for legal research;
• To create an open ecosystem for legal research and materials;
• To support academic research on related technologies, corpora, and legal systems; and
• To carry on other charitable activities associated with these purposes, including, but not limited to, publications, meetings, conferences, trainings, educational seminars, and the issuance of grants and other financial support to educational institutions, foundations, and other organizations exclusively for educational, charitable, and scientific purposes as allowed by law.

In 2013, Free Law Project joined the Free Access to Law Movement.

What We Do

Current activities of Free Law Project are as follows:

• We seek to collect and freely distribute online all United States court opinions, both state and federal, both historical and current. Our collection of current opinions is accomplished through generous data donations and our Juriscraper project. Online distribution of the opinions occurs through our CourtListener project. We will soon audit this collection of opinions and fill any gaps that we discover.

  At that time, we will have a complete collection of legal opinions in an open and accessible form.

• We host the RECAP Project including the RECAP Archive and the extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. This project frees millions of dockets, docket entries, and documents from PACER, making them searchable on CourtListener and uploading them to the Internet Archive for permanent backup.

• We develop technologies for use in legal research, such as opinion and PACER alerting services, advanced search capabilities, and a citator. These tools are deployed at CourtListener.

• We host a database of judges with deep research on thousands of state and federal judges including their appointer information, campaign finance data, biographical information, roles held before, during and after the judicial branch, political affiliations, education, and more.

• We collaborate with others with similar goals and license all the software we develop under free software licenses. Source code is available for Juriscraper, CourtListener, and the RECAP extensions. Our APIs enable others to analyze and reuse the materials we have collected. We even offer bulk downloading for some types of data.

• We provide data and research services to support academic researchers and journalists in their efforts to study and report on the legal world.

• We lead workshops, present at conferences, and hold other events to educate others about our work, how to get involved, and the underlying challenges facing the free acces to law movement.

See our Non-Profit Documents.