Since launching the CAP API and Bulk Data Service in Fall 2018, we’ve been developing a research community around the Caselaw Access Project dataset.

Last week we hosted the first Caselaw Access Project Research Summit to bring together researchers from this community who had already made progress exploring data made available by the Caselaw Access Project.

Presenters shared research that highlighted a broad range of disciplines and perspectives. They explored the contents of court opinions and the evolution of language over time. They examined things like text comprehension and language patterns and explored themes like link rot and connecting legal data with other digital collections. They asked what words appear in this text corpus, how we can identify changes in the meaning of those words, and how changes in this legal corpus connect to the larger landscape. All of their work was interesting and important, and we’re excited to see what insights they continue to develop.

The Caselaw Access Project Research Summit was our first attempt to bring researchers together in person to meet, share and learn, and to help us better understand how we can support their work. We’re immensely grateful for their participation in the event, and we look forward to doing it again.

Are you using Caselaw Access Project data in your work? Share it with us at info@case.law.