 Thanks so much again for attending this workshop and thank you to me and Jeff for being here as well. This session is devoted to the Supreme Court and we're going to take a riff, a little riff on that concept of the Supreme Court to anticipate what other Supreme Courts might want to do with information that were freely available but for my commentary and for these and for a portion of Jeff's, we'll stay true to the mission of talking about the Supreme Court and access to its primary periods. So the OEA project for those of you who don't know about it, it's been around for about 15 years or so in various incarnations and right now it dishes out an enormous amount, a staggering amount of material to a fairly wide audience, largely in the United States and Canada although still some non-trivial traffic around the world. Most recently we have about 850,000 user sessions a month of April with about 450,000 visitors accessing 3.6 million pages of content with about 7 minutes per session on site and downloading a little more than 1.7 terabytes of data largely in the form of more arguments. We collect the oil arguments when they're available, when they're not available on the court, a rather contentious issue for me although it hasn't managed to change the court's policy and I'll get back to that in a minute or two. And we have retrieved and digitized all of the audio held at National Archives from 1955 to the present and piece term by term we are making the content of a digitization effort available through the OEA project. In fact, I think next week we'll probably post the audio from 1967, that was probably a good year, 190 hours of audio from here to the 19, to the 2008 term, I think we had about 80 hours of audio including oral pronouncements and opinions. So the court is spending far less time on the argument deciding fewer cases, but this historical material seems to have some attraction to a wide array of users. We are pushing solely but surely into new environments to make access convenient. One of our new projects was the release of Pocket Justice, an iPhone application and thanks to the enormous generosity of Justia, Tim Stanley. Pocket Justice is available as a free app for iPhone users and it seems to be pretty attractive. The engineering that went into it is clever. I guess I could summarize its functionality as flip, tap, listen. That's all you have to do. It's sort of today's version of rip mix burn. Next step, of course, is for us to give you an iPad application which will, with greater real estate, allow us to integrate not just the audio and the abstracts and the voting data, but perhaps even your new opinions as well. And one of the features we hope we can implement is audio annotation of the audio. So when you're listening to a chunk of audio tap on a section that you think is important and in the transcript, then you can also annotate that with a voice commentary. So finding new ways to use this information is really exciting. When we're done, and that is when I reach my milestone of transcribing the audio, annotating, identifying all the speakers, and synchronizing the transcripts to the audio at the sentence level, we'll have a database of about 110 million words over 55 years that will outdistance any similar database of spoken English that I know of. Actually, the closest one is in size of about 50 million words, so I think we've really gone over the top. But it's just the last mile for us, so basically the last 2,000 hours of audio, that's a great challenge. The earliest audio has some challenging issues to it and we have to put in some exceptional engineering effort to make those materials audible and transcribable and then use our future identification models to say, do I figure out who actually whispered that comment because he failed to turn off his microphone. So that's our challenge. The big challenge going forward is getting the court to release these materials in a more timely way. The court for the last 55 years has released the audio at the end, the official end of the current term, which is the first Monday in October. So even though an argument took place on October 9th of 2009, you will not hear it until sometime in October 2010. And it just seems to be utterly nonsensical to release these materials. And I think we collectively have to find ways to challenge John Roberts to justify why there can be no change in the existing policy, given the demand for the content that's easy to demonstrate and to convince the Supreme Court that what they did 55 years ago can now be altered ever so slightly, perhaps releasing the audio in the end of June, perhaps releasing the audio at the end of every month, perhaps releasing the audio at the end of every week, God forbid release the audio same day. But these are easy steps to accomplish and the challenge of course is to get the court to recognize that the American people deserve access to that information. It's great irony, isn't it, that here we are seeking to open up our legal institutions for public view. And just in the last couple of weeks the Supreme Court decided to permanently close interest in the Supreme Court to its main doors. So access to justice in a way is still foreclosed through the normal channels. But there are some clever people in this room who can nevertheless find ways to make access to these legal materials engaging and valuable to us all. That's my segue to my colleague Lee Epstein, who is a bona fide political scientist and a distinguished member of a faculty at Northwestern law school. And she for many years has worked on a project called Supreme Court Database. I'm going to ask Lee to describe the Supreme Court database, its origins and its value for open access to legal information. While she's doing that, I'm hoping that Jeff can bring up law.gov as a, I mean the Supreme Court database website so they can actually see and understand how it operates. So stay around. So Lee, what is the Supreme Court database? Well, just very briefly, the Supreme Court database provides information to 200 plus pieces of information on every case that's been argued before the Supreme Court since 1953. And the information ranges from basic things, the name of the case, the docket number, all the citations, date of argument, date of decision, all the way through what law was that issue, what were the basic issues in the case, how did the justices vote, who wrote what opinions, that sort of information on every single case since the 1953 term. We just got a grant from the National Science Foundation to take the database back to the first published Supreme Court opinion in 1792. So that's what we'll be working on for the next three years is to backdate the database. The database is updated at the end of every term. So at the end of June, we'll have covered the 2009 term. I can give you just a little bit of history about it. The database was actually started by a fellow named Harold Stath in the mid 1980s. Harold is a very prominent political scientist, but he's also a lawyer. And he got an initial grant from the National Science Foundation to create the database. It quickly became the dominant tool for information on the Supreme Court in the political science community. But frankly, it wasn't used very much by lawyers, journalists, law professors, law librarians, and so on, because the only way you could access it was through statistical software like SPSS and STATA. And so you needed to specialize knowledge of that software to use. And throughout the years, what happened would be people like myself and Harold and others would get phone calls from law professors and lawyers. They wanted basic information, journalists in particular too. They wanted basic information about the Supreme Court. How many cases did the court override its own decisions? How many boys of Congress did the court overturn and so on to each term? They would call us to get the information. So what we did a couple of years back is we went to the National Science Foundation. We said, look, the first thing we want to do before we back date the database is modernize the whole thing and create versions of the database and infrastructure so that anybody could access them. High school students could access them. And what you're seeing up here is the result of that initial grant from the National Science Foundation. Let me see, you'll see here four panels. If you click on the data panel, the data, and just click down here in case center, yeah, click there, right, and then click on anything, click the showed pilot, yeah, right. Okay, so the database now can be downloaded in lots and lots of different forms. Pretty accessible from the statistical software, state, and so on to Excel files. And if you go back up to the top, if you click on documentation, you'll be able to get the meaning of all of the variables in the data set here. So just click on respondent, for example. And each respondent or appellee in the suit gets a code in the database. You can see there's lots and lots of different types of respondents. All of this has been coded in the database. And the other documentation on the right side, those are all the variables in the database. And you can play with it and look and get information about what's actually in there. So suppose you are utterly unfamiliar with these data packages. Is it possible to do some basic analysis from the website itself? Yes. If you go back to the home page of the data set and go up to go to analysis. Now this is actually a very cool feature of the data set. So you can do analyses of the data without actually opening any data set. Go down a little. Give me some data you want. How about Robert's Court? Let's look at the Robert's Court. So if you pull down include all courtiers, pull that down. Let's just do all Robert's Court cases. I don't know how many cases there was a constitutional challenge. Okay. Yeah, so let's pick Orly Orgud cases. It says Decision Type up there. So click Judgment of the Court. Click Opinion of the Court Orly Orgud. And then click Procuria Orly Orgud. And then just go down. I think there should be a box on Constitutional. Yeah. So Constitution. Just click Constitution. Okay. And then... But if I change my mind and say I want to know what cases involve a federal statute, I'd just be able to click... Oh yeah, yeah. And then if you click Sub Issues, just to click Sub Issues, you can pick whatever part of the Constitution you want. We've clicked all of them. But you can click, unclick, whatever. And then if you scroll all the way down to the bottom, we won't do anything else. Just say Analyze. Just click Analyze. Okay. This will just give you the case frequency for the Roberts Court. So 2005 term, two constitutional issues. I don't think we did the amendments. I think we just did the body of the Constitution. And if you go down, it'll tell you whether the decision was decided in a liberal direction, a conservative direction. And for those meetings, you'll have to look at the documentation. And then if you go back up, so that's just going to give you an overview. But you could click things like... Do case details right over down here. That will give you all of the constitutional cases. I'll listen to that. And if you click on the case... Give you case detail. You can pick any case. It'll give you the case where it came from. All kinds of basic information. And you can actually even get to the case. Do public resource up here. Okay. Hit a case under case name. It says public resource. And is that... Okay, we don't have that case. Do final. It'll take you to the case. Oops. Nope. Yeah. There's some issues with getting to the case. That's why we're here? Yeah. We're having some issues with the latest cases. But if you go back to 53, you should be able to get through public resource, which is a stripped down version of the case and final. But you can analyze cases in all different ways from the resource without actually having to use the database. And now a lot of our law students, of course, are using this analysis page. You know, it doesn't require any skills at all to use it. Also, journalists, of course, are using it as well. If you see in newspapers and magazines, if it says U.S. Supreme Court database, that's what they've used to get there. And my guess is at this point, pretty much any quantitative study of the Supreme Court is now relying on this site and these databases. The last thing I'll say is the data here are quite reliable. We continually draw 10% samples of the data to check and make sure everything is as it should be. And we also, of course, rely on users. And I would say once a week, somebody points out, you know, there's a mistake here, there's an error here that we look at. We're very responsive to the user community. I usually state those very politely to Harold Stake because I know how much energy he's put into this. But he's pretty generous when it's a mistake. He'll acknowledge it and it'll change. So we trip over these usually because we have so many thousands of people poking at our data which relies in large measure for this period from Supreme Court data. And that's really a nice way to integrate a larger user community into perfecting this rich metadata resource. What about the plans? Could you talk a bit about your plans to build this back to 1791? We've started. We've already finished the Marshall Court. So we're working backwards, actually. There's been a couple of really cool features of backdating the database. One is we have a, what do you call Troy, a computer science guy? I don't know, a database infrastructure guy. We've hired somebody who works full time on this and he created an enormously useful and effective database management system. So we have four schools working on backdating the database and I would say probably at this point 30 to 40 students they can work anywhere, they can enter the data from anywhere and it's just an amazingly cool back end system with lots of safety checks in it to enter the data. Something the National Science Foundation was very interested in doing was creating a template for database entry and that's what we've done. Of course there's been tremendous challenges with taking this database back to 1791. Courts, everything from, you know, we include in the database from where did the case come? What was the case source? What was the origin of the case? Of course if you know your legal history there were scores and scores of courts back in the 1790s and 1800s that don't exist today. And so we had to do an enormous amount of state work just to create what we call legacy courts, legacy issues, lots of legal issues that the court took back then that are really off the docket now. So if we put a lot of work to be able to back date this thing we think and we will release it. So by the end of the summer we're hoping to release the Marshall and the Tawny courts. We will release them as we finish them. We hope in three to four years to be completely back dated and of course we continue to update every year. Well it's interesting that my little Cad Ray right now is focused on GIS data for the recent cases. So we thought we'd have longitude and latitude data for every case and it would be great if we could somehow integrate that into this larger project. Do you have any sense whether outsiders like me and others could be able to contribute in some community effort to enlarge and enrich the spring work of this? We do on the site, I think we now have things like data repositories and code. This would be useful for statistical analysis code repositories so where people can drop off additional data that could be added or they could put their computer code for manipulating the data that already exists. I'll give you one example I think is already in the repository. We've developed a measure of case importance. How salient or how important is a particular case that lots of social scientists use. We have put the data set in the repository so you can add it and merge it very quickly into the existing databases and that's what we hope. Now it's a pretty comprehensive data set but people have very wide ranging interests when it comes to the Supreme Court. We can't anticipate every single one of them. So what lots of folks do especially in the social sciences they create new variables, new columns of data that they simply merge onto this existing data set and we hope that the site will become a repository for those. One of the issues that I think has helped maintain National Science Foundation funding of this project is we are very, very careful about the reliability of the data. We want the data to be reliable and so there's some, you know, we have some hesitation about just adding variables that people give us to the existing data set with unknown reliability and that's why we're going to keep them in the repository. Take a chance, add them if you want. Great, we have a question or comment. A gentleman in the back first. When you're doing analysis of Supreme Court decisions whether it's filed later or filed later it's sometimes nice to have access to the papers of the justices and I realize that those papers with respect to particular cases are available primarily only for justices who have died, right? Otherwise these papers are not released so my question is, is there access, are these papers digitized anywhere and are they available on either of the two sites in the property about thus far this morning? Yeah, let me answer. Could you repeat the question? The question concerns the papers of the justices and so some justices have left very extensive collections of their papers for example Justice Blackman, others have left, no papers at all. Most of the papers of the justices are located in the Library of Congress. There are exceptions. Lewis Powell left his papers at Washington and Lee Law School. The justices leave their papers on their own terms. So some justices, their papers will not be open until everyone with whom they've served has died. I think that's Sandra Day O'Connor. There will be more show, other justices, as soon as they leave the court the papers open. It's their choice. There's been talk that that shouldn't be that these are public government papers, they should simply be released. I think Euclid Black burned his. So the Library of Congress, and by the way Brennan made his papers available only with consent of his family. So if you want to use Brennan's papers you have to get consent of the family for scholars and librarians and so on that I've never heard of a term down but you still have to go through that gatekeeping. For the most part these papers have not been digitized. Some of the information on them has been quantified. For example, how many drafts do the majority of the Indian go through? We've quantified some of that information. I think there's a couple, just a few digital archives. We have one on a different website. If you go to my website, just Google the Epstein 30 and just go to introduction, hit Blackman archive, scroll down and go to the archive. Click here, yeah. So what we've got is you go down and just do 1986 term and just click on anything over here. We've got the docket sheets of the Justices where they record their votes. Just click on anyone. It should just come up. We've got the docket sheets of the Justices up there and we also have PDF files of the cert pool memos. Those are the memos written by the law clerks to suggest whether the court should grant or deny certs. So we have those for the 1986 through 1994 terms. This was an enormous data collection project. Again, the National Science Foundation supported it, but we had to send teams of students into the Library of Congress to photograph these documents and then we created PDF files from the documents. Then this archive, you can search the archive. Normally people, yeah, there's the cert pool memos. Normally people would search it on docket numbers and we get, you know, not as many hits as Jerry gets on Oye, but we get a fair number of users on a daily basis. Lots of law firms like to look at these cert pool memos because it gives them some insight into how to write a cert petition for the Supreme Court. So that we've done, but you can see the magnitude. This is millions of pages of documents and the magnitude of the project, it's difficult. And I don't, you know, I think the Library of Congress likes that we've done this, but they certainly don't have the funds to do this. Sure. There's another question. We're talking about the cross tab reports. Is that similar to what you can do at the Census site where you put in several variables and the statistical stuff gets in the next table? Yes, that's exactly what it is. The cross tabs part of the analysis site, you can do some basic tables. A cross tab is your cross tabulated two variables. So like the term of the court and the number of criminal cases, something like that. We don't have the facility to do fancier analyses like regression analyses. We're working on it. We're trying to do it so that there are safety valves in there that you can't mess it up too much. It's pretty easy to mess up the statistical analyses and get the wrong results. So we're trying to put some safety valves in. But right now you can do some basic stuff using the analysis feature. John. A small point. When you ask a question, I'll tell you to give your name and your affiliation just real quick because not everybody in the room knows everybody. I did have a question. Okay. Who are you? I was just realizing. John Bayer, Kelly. This is incredibly valuable and the Supreme Court, of course, is very unique, but there's lots of other courts for which this process might be gone through. Have you documented the making of the Supreme Court database or thought about that sort of metadocument that says, here will be learned in the process of doing this? Yes, I believe that the people who have worked on the back end have documented all of this stuff and are sharing it through publications and other means with people who develop these kinds of databases. It is a good story. The whole thing tracing back to the 1980s and the person that we would really need to get to do the front end is Howard State. And to really do an oral history with him and then write a written history of this would be, somebody should do it. Well, I don't, I don't record it as well. Yeah, correct. Let me ask you another question about the database. Lots of scholars are relying on the Quinn Martin index. That's Kevin Quinn and Andrew Martin. Andrew is a collaborator of yours with the Supreme Court database. And these ideological scores are really robust, but they rely on data from the Supreme Court database built on non-unanimous decisions. But in the period, in the earlier period that you're now investigating and working on, there are very few split decisions. Is there some way to construct at a similarly robust ideological index for this earlier period in the court's history? Yeah, I mean, this is an issue. So one of the things I think scientists and increasingly law professors and journalists are interested in is the ideology of the justices, of the decisions, how conservative it is, Clarence Thomas sort of thing. And we've relied, as Jerry says, on these Martin Quinn estimates of ideology and it's a sort of complicated algorithm, but they apply the algorithm, as Jerry says, to cases with dissent. If you go back in the court's history really before 1930s, there are minimal levels of dissent. So how do you get the ideology of the court? One way to do it is through looking at the conference votes as opposed to the final votes. So we looked at the conference votes, the docket sheets, private docket sheets of Chief Justice Wait, not a very memorable Chief Justice except for the fact that he left his docket books 10 years worth. And it turns out that in private conference dissenting then was as high as it is now. They just never made the dissents public. So assuming we know we have them for tax, assuming we can get the private docket books, that would be a way to do it. We also might want to look at separate writing and select concurrences, but it's an issue because what happens is there's so few dissents that try to assess the ideology of the justices or the cases that you're going to have huge error terms that you're basing your estimates on such a small number of cases. That's great. I've already discovered a nice hopeful vision that you'll be able to advance that piece of scholarship. Well, are there any other questions for Lee? All right, then it's my hope. Okay, use it. It's great. I want to turn the discussion over to my colleague and friend Jeff Parsons. Jeff wrote to me several years ago out of the blue and offered to assist me with the further development of the NOAA project. And if you have followed my work over several years and you noticed the improvements, I'll give 95% of the credit to Jeff because it was his inspiration and his hard work that led to the improvements that we have now and I'm sure for the plans we have for the future. Jeff has, in his remarks, as he's going to riff, I guess I'll call it that, it's a riff on the Supreme Court. One thought that Jeff had and I endorsed a few years ago was to figure out how we could spread the idea of public access to state Supreme Courts and to intermediate federal appellate courts. Our reason for doing this is that in my judgment, and I'm prepared to make the argument, that courts themselves are never going to view the public as a principal client. The client base for any court would typically include the attorneys who argue there, other judges, court personnel, and those who are intimately connected with the day-to-day operation of that particular institution. But we, the public, I think are at some distance, so it's going to take the effort of some devoted outsider to take that information and recreate it in a form that would be useful to a larger audience. It may be a professional audience, but it could be a non-professional audience. So Jeff decided to engage the Washington State Supreme Court with this idea of, I guess we call it, a derivative O.E.A. project. And I'll let him talk about this when he's done there. And then I hope he'll share his current work on Supreme Court on one or two other projects related to the U.S. Supreme Court. So, Jeff, forward to yours. Thanks, Jerry. I was very fortunate to look up with Jerry and spend the last four or five years working with him on the O.E.A. project. I guess in keeping with the theme of the conference here, I wanted to mention a few things that, you know, frustrations that we've had over time dealing with the U.S. Supreme Court. A couple examples would be briefs. Unfortunately, a few years ago, the court agreed to start making briefs available on their own website, but for some reason they never actually did that. There's always been some sort of back channel of the U.S. Supreme Court to the ABA that posts the briefs. And that's been one frustration. And making sure that the briefs aren't complete for every case, we've discovered that a lot of times the ABA doesn't have everything associated with the case. And we try to, we still have a lot of work to do in terms of getting as many briefs as possible linked to the O.E.A. case pages, but that's one of the goals for the O.A. project is to make those available on each of the case pages. Another frustration was docket sheets for some reason. It was never really explained to be two years ago the court urged at least five or six years worth of docket sheets off their website. And we were able to get copies of them from the Internet Archive using the Wayback machine. And I think maybe the court has restored them now that they've updated their websites. So that's good. But I think it highlights a fundamental problem, which is that we don't have there's no real assurance the government seems to, you know, we like to see commitment when this data is out there, that it be preserved, and unfortunately there is that commitment and the data is just mysterious. So anyway, after working for several years on the O.E.A. project, and since I live in the state of Washington, by the way, I should mention that I'm not a lawyer I'm not an academic, I'm just a software engineer who just had to make an interest in the courts. I was simultaneously impressed and just made with our state court resources. We have a state court website where they'll publish their children's opinions and send them together in their 90 days and they publish a calendar. There's also these other resources. We have another organization called TBW which is funded by the combination of public and private money. And the last 15 years they've been doing a fantastic job of recording audio and video of all the legislative sessions and states of informal arguments. And then there's another similar website where you can get past opinions after the slip of hands disappeared. After 90 days you can go to a third website that's called the Municipal Research and Services Council site and you can get past opinions there. So we have the wealth of resources but unfortunately they're all spread out there's no connection between them and it can be a challenge to get all the information about a particular case if you're looking for something. So I'm glad, well let's see if we can replicate something like the way you project for the city of Washington. So that's where the, since our courthouse is called the Temple of Justice that's what I decided to call the project. After about a year's worth of looking around for our sponsor I think we've found a good home for the project at Washington State University. There's a political scientist there, Cornell Clayton, who's the director of the Bolling Institute and he's been great in terms of getting people to help populate the website, this new website Temple of Justice with abstracts for landmark cases that was our initial focus was Washington State landmark cases. And then for the last few years we're trying to get abstracts in place for the recent cases and the motivation actually is very much on these slides. Okay sorry, I touched on this. So some of the motivations is just unification. It's great that there's Google and Google it can usually find what you're looking for but I think the loyalty approach is much preferred where all the information about a case is centralized. You want to find the briefs, you want to find the opinion, you want to find the votes, you want to find just the basic description of the case that it's great to just have one place to go. So another frustration was that this lack of reservations the fact that some of the opinions disappear. And I understand why we've had conversations with the court administrator about this and obviously the one opinion is published that's the official opinion, they don't want people to refrain to submit opinions. But the reality is that the world, the internet world links to these things and it would be great if we had some sort of a standard where once you link to an opinion the link lives forever. The sub-opinion may ultimately be replaced by a published opinion that the link shouldn't go dead. We also have a collection of audio materials housed at the state archives. Unfortunately they're not a catalog in the reasonable way. It's about another 15 years and it can go back to the early 80s. So from the early 80s and around 95 they have a lot of consent tapes at the archives and it's kind of hit and miss because they didn't record every case they would reuse the sets often so basically whatever the last case would be stored. And the other frustration is basically that the state, there is no clear commitment to the state preserving this information so it's really coming on other groups to take up that challenge. And the challenge will link rows because unfortunately they're just producing new opinions every year and they never go away. And then a third motivation was just improving the public awareness of work and making it more accessible, more understandable because the average person trying to parse case synopsis that's posted on the state core website it's really challenging, it's really just one sentence and they were referred to probably some section that provides to go to Washington and people don't often know how to find that either so it'll be great to solve some of these problems. And it will provide some historical information. Again the court has really just focused on the present so it might be our degree of justice who served 10 or 15 years ago that's all going on so we're trying to resurrect that past. And it'll be some sections on the site to explain the history and operations of the court. And address a lot of common questions because our court likes to travel every three terms a year and at least once every term they will travel to another future university or community college and they'll actually hear cases at that venue and then they'll also take questions from the audience so there's a lot of current questions that come up how does the operation of the state court compare to the U.S. court so it'll be a thing like that that we can address. So this is just a picture of some of the challenges the red volume that you see is something that you used to maintain until the early 80s so these docket volumes you have screenshots of the pages in there. And to meticulously record all the justices who were in attendance for a given case and who the attorneys that actually argued the cases were how long they argued. And unfortunately this is all data that they either don't keep anymore or if they do it's buried in their case management system and we've asked if there's any way we could get that data from them and that apparently isn't possible at least with the current system they're using. One of the challenges of producing a site like the Temple of Justice website is pulling together all the information I talked about that's scattered across these different sites so I've built multiple scripts that go ahead and periodically get that information from those sites. Some of it is automated for example as new briefs appear on the state court website and when new opinions appear I'm actually able to parse the opinion and display it both how many justices are in the majority how many descendants but it still needs some human intervention and that's where the Gauley Institute at Washington State can come in and provide the plain English description of the case and how it would evolve and hopefully we'll be able to do a better job of rendering the opinions particularly past opinions because unfortunately in the process of going from slip opinion to published opinion to an electronic opinion that appears on another website it gets mangled in the process often times you bring up opinions with question marks and strange characters because they obviously haven't they obviously can start with the right character set. Another thing we've been looking at is using Google Scholar to as a way of displaying the past opinions since they provide state court opinions going back to 1950 currently and hopefully they'll eventually go all over back. But I have the same concerns about Google Scholar that I have about the state federal governments in general and that's their commitment to preserving this data. I'm not sure that Google has actually stated for example if you have a link to one of their opinions will that link persist in perpetuity or will it go dead like some people seem to do after a few years and what is their commitment to this data? I know they've paid a fair amount of money to get all of this data will it be some point where it doesn't make good business sense for Google to continue posting this data? And if so what's the plan for making sure that remains available to the public? And then just finding the links to the opinions can be a challenge because there isn't really a standard for the link format. If you actually find it in Google Scholar you'll probably notice that the URL has this very long case ID which doesn't relate poorly to a U.S. report citation for example. Getting those links is kind of a challenge. You can't just fire off the scripts to get them all because Google will block you because they say we must be sprayed in our site so we're not going to do that. And then another issue would be just promoting greater transparency because there's all this metadata that's basically trapped inside the case management systems. I think it would be great at least for object data if it was a subject of data it would be great if all the data that was objective could be serviced so that the Screenware Data Grade Project for example wouldn't have to go in write scripts or whatever to actually extract that data from other sources but it was just provided in some XML that were published along with the docket or the opinion I think that would be preferable. And then the final issue was just the differences that we run into at least in the state of Washington when dealing with administrators versus the actual justices. Typically the default answer for anything you ask for an administrator is no whereas the Chief Justice and we talked to last year's Chief Justice and our new Chief Justice this year and they both have been very supportive of the project. They wanted to be very clear just to claim around our site that there's no the Screenware is not endorsing our site it's a completely separate venture and we've done that. Once that's been done they've been very very interested in this project and in fact we're now Clayton and I have met with all nine justices a few months ago to give a little overview of the OIA project and the Temple of Justice project that we both have finished by late summer and they were very very interested in being very supportive of it. So that's good news. So the Temple of Justice site is live now it still says beta on the banner. There's still a lot of cases to abstract and we also did a bunch of photography last month at the court and we're in the process of putting together a little virtual tour so you can see what it's like to walk through the court and visit the justices chambers which most people I should point out to you the site was put together with basic off the shelf open source software we didn't pay any money for it it's just WordPress with a few basic plugins to take advantage of built-in metadata support to WordPress now and then some custom being worked to actually handle the way we want the case pages to actually appear I suppose I could probably bring up a web browser with a site that's live right now on the page we have an RSS feed for all the recent cases that have been decided there's a podcast feed for all the recent R4 arguments the court calendar and then first and foremost for these cases that the state has heard or are going to have and links to the TVW site so you can play a video and once the case has been decided we have 186 25 I don't have all the emails yet but this is the basic view it looks very similar to the way a project is and you can click on any justice and if you have more details about it this should be a link to the google stall at hand and there's no breach for this case it's an older case but newer cases for example on the market yesterday there's a list of all the briefs and you can bring them up so it's the goal is to make it your at least for the the late person that you're going to stop on the website for information Jeff, I have a question can vendors scrape your site and record to send it to you? I don't think so people are really aware of it there's no copyright why us anyway Jeff, suppose someone wanted to build a site for another state Supreme Court could that individual align on your on this WordPress environment bring something similar to what you've done? yeah, definitely in fact I'd be happy to make all the template changes that I made for posting this site available I just started with the standard WordPress template and it just makes a tweak to it this is probably the one page that was tweaked the most because it has to surface all the metadata for the case for the docket the argument date so Jeff one more question you're doing a wonderful job on Washington, does this mean that the Supreme Court doesn't really do anything except maybe feed you a little more metadata or are there things that the state court should be doing I think this applies to the Goya project and the Supreme Court, if the Goya project has such a wonderful resource do we need the Supreme Court to do anything? we need them to at least like you said surface more metadata just provide us with feeds so never opinion is released or change the docket there's some sort of like an RSS feed but I think those are some people associated with articles something like an RSS feed but it just surfaces new XML with all the metadata for that case so if there's just more information like that, that would be great in fact one of the comments from the Supreme Court justices why don't you guys work on our website I sense some frustration with the limitations of their own site, they're aware of it but apparently they don't have the money or the man is already really too much their site hasn't changed much for the last probably almost 10 years I'd say state your name please that's round style so Carl's question makes me wonder why you shouldn't be working on the Washington State Supreme Court's website because I suspect you're much more fragile than they are in terms of these durability issues and who's going to be there in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years so isn't that the right answer to his question that you're an illustration of what could be done but you don't have 80 years or 90 years or state sanction to make us all confident that you're going to be there that's right ideally the government would be to be taking responsibility for all this but I'm just not sure how we get there so this is sort of the first step I'm saying look what could be done okay is the weather appetite or somebody's appetite in the legislature so at least provide a budget or someone in the court to ask for a budget I'm not sure how that will happen can I ask how big your budget is is that a personal question this is a wonderful site if the state of Washington wished to provide that and assuming they didn't have to inflate your budget 10 fold what would it cost them well that would depend on how much they wanted to pay a real person to do it I'm a real person but I I don't charge anything I do this in my spare time basically how much it would cost to get one full time person how much do you spend on it now I understand you're volunteering what's the burn rate for a year on this site well right now it's probably this is a part 10 project probably 15 that's about it and that doesn't include the work of Foley Institute and support the human endeavor that they put into this project as well but it's not it's probably less than the cost of what I suspect the court is paying now for its current terms of manpower and just dollars is this a tens of thousands of dollars per year enterprise or millions of dollars per year enterprise assuming you were to get paid and everyone were to get paid is this millions of dollars a year no it would be tens of thousands maybe maybe fifty thousand so half of them DE they're the same state your name please I'm Michael Roback from the University of Illinois College of Law has the National Center for State Reports expressed an interest in helping or being kind of sort of lying to the president that they're trying to do at least in terms of data management well let's really talk about that because we presented at their last conference but I don't know what kind of feedback you actually got no their clients tell this not the public it's other court administrators court personnel so that's I'm a court administrator and I certainly endorse Jeff's characterization we met with the administrators and several of them and all we could do was find roadblocks to everything we wanted to do we met with the justices they were just gaga at what we were trying to accomplish and delighted to help us maybe it's because the court administrators are not elected but judges in the state of Washington are so there's some importance in providing a positive public face for these men and women and I think we've served that function well whereas the court's own site really fails in that respect it's related to the point about how the court administrators and personnel perceive endeavors like this and it seems like you already mentioned that usually they don't consider the public or anybody else except the attorneys to be their primary patrons and it seems like this is fine because you guys are scholars and academics you want to do all this great research and move your career to school but that's not why we were there we're here to administer the courts and the attorneys stay in the out we don't really have an interest it's not our job and we don't want to be out there so that's why we think there's a market for this but it takes public-spirited individuals academics who see commitment and institutions typically universities law schools who are here for the long term ready to maintain that I'd like to think that there's somebody here in the 7th Circuit who'd like to do something for the 7th Circuit website and Frank Easterbrook is the most technologically aware federal judge now I know of the one at the top and that website could certainly partly from a similar re-engineering we're actually generating that data from the 7th Circuit into something like this Tim, say your name I'm Tim Stanton, I'm just here we're doing something similar it's not quite as old as the bells and whistles that you've built with the type of justice but for the state of law school to get students to annotate the cases and it's heard up all the ways and everyone's been doing their research right there it's I think one thing that I don't know if you or someone else got reports to start putting their annotation we're finding the state of law for example it's great but the recording though is that the students are really sort of looking at analyzing the cases and it has their name on it so it gets indexed by Google so it remains on it forever and they do a pretty good job of it and it starts creating some challenge great idea I hope more law schools take up the challenge and we have a back end now that can fit just about any institution before we overstay our welcome here I really would like Jeff to talk about his supreme court work because I think it's going to be a great benefit to all of us I'll be to that I just have one slide on this because I wasn't really sure how relevant it is I just put this website together on a whim because for a couple of things, one one day I was reading an article in the Green Bank their Almanac 2010 I think it was basically about the SEC and it was amazing and just on the very first page of the article it was like footnotes soup at the bottom it was just like 8 or 9 different footnotes something extremely long it would be great if there was something like a tiny URL or something like that for legal materials that would be great for lawyers to work to use and plus I also have my own needs right now, I'm working on an iPad application basically an application that will have all of the published US Supreme Court opinion built into it and so I needed a repository for that information it was basically just taking what Carl has on the US Supreme Court along with some other resources the Supreme Court has a comprehensive list of case citations and then there's the Supreme Court database itself so I have these three primary system information I can merge them into a set of XML files and put them on this website which will form the basis for some other projects I'm working on but I also added the ability to create these what I call persistent URLs for these legal materials and the idea was it would be a well formed URL for a given court and a given opinion from that court and then if there were other organizations that had their own links to those related to those cases then there could be additions to the URL you see three examples here one for Google Scholar and this kind of so it makes the the law easier to cite and if you go to the website and you type in a site the US Supreme Court citation it'll actually display I have some examples on the example page so if you were to just type in 3D4, US4, 36 and in this box here it'll display a very basic citation for that including the sort of tiny URL link that I've generated for that case and if you had other resources or repository information for that case there's a mechanism for adding that to the site I just have Google Scholar and lawyer right now so this would be the what you'd normally see from Google Scholar that I generate a more compact URL so it just takes you straight to the Google Scholar's rendition of the case and all of this all 35,000 Supreme Court opinions will reside on your iPad and searchable because they're all the indexes, all the indices are wrapped up in the app, it's just instantaneous search and I'll be using some of the metadata from the Supreme Court database so you can do some basic filtering complicating some of my constitutional issues or eras of different national courts of the interim, by specific justice and that sort of thing So this is obviously a sophisticated data processing application for the Supreme Court I'm assuming the reporter of the Supreme Court and the librarian are coming out here once a month to work with you or the administrative office of the courts has been asking you to come in for briefings Yes, on a regular basis, in my dreams there's the court and the individuals in the court generally are at arm's length from my efforts I have cordial relationships with just about all the principles but their court administrators in court administrator mode they're good at saying no and they're also very good at identifying what the Chief Justice and his principal court administrator Jeff who's name now escapes me Yes, Jeff Nier signals and that is you can do this but I think the most resistance I've had was from the clerk of the court and that's when I said I asked him for copies or access to the electronic versions of the briefs since the briefs are now required to be submitted electronically I couldn't see any reason why he would say that we couldn't have them because we knew we could do a better job than the ABA in sharing it and he wouldn't he wouldn't deem to answer my request even though it was a polite one but he did send a message to the public information officer who then relayed to me that the clerk would not answer the answer is no and that he wouldn't answer my request so I think the problem there is that the court likes to hunker down it is terribly resistant to change of any sort the ABA is a safe way to proceed from their perspective and the fact that the ABA watermarks the briefs and encrypts them that doesn't matter because I don't think the clerk understands watermarking and encryption so it doesn't seem to bother him or bother some of us so we found our own way around that but it's just a long and tedious process and we just need better access to sharing I think in the long term the court has to concede something to the public but I think it's biggest fear is video important so any step it takes in that direction either by war by any release of same day audio or same month audio is a step closer to the challenge of putting video on the court I'd be interested to know what Solicitor General Kagan says on that score she's already spoken of she's open to the idea ok, open to the idea, that's good that's better than most of all that's correct, better than being close to the idea of the story so I think it's still a long way I was there recently and just sat around for a tour of the building I confirmed with tour leaders asking for questions I said, are there any players? I heard that there are statunes behind the bench yes, behind the bench there's a statune at every spot I said, when was the last time that anyone spat in a statune? she couldn't guess but I would figure it was probably around 1900, 1920 when that was still an accepted public activity but the statunes are still there so change comes but in the meantime we can't change, we must change we can't resist change we accept change and we'll figure out how to make this work thanks to Carl's energy and vision we'll put our shoulder to this big wheel and get it rolling any other questions? thank you Carl