--- license: cc0-1.0 language: - en tags: - united states - law - legal - court - opinions size_categories: - 1M # Collaborative Open Legal Data (COLD) - Cases COLD Cases is a dataset of 8.3 million United States legal decisions with text and metadata, formatted as compressed parquet files. If you'd like to view a sample of the dataset formatted as JSON Lines, you can view one [here](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/harvard-lil/cold-cases-export/main/sample.jsonl) This dataset exists to support the open legal movement exemplified by projects like [Pile of Law](https://huggingface.co/datasets/pile-of-law/pile-of-law) and [LegalBench](https://hazyresearch.stanford.edu/legalbench/). A key input to legal understanding projects is caselaw -- the published, precedential decisions of judges deciding legal disputes and explaining their reasoning. United States caselaw is collected and published as open data by [CourtListener](https://www.courtlistener.com/), which maintains scrapers to aggregate data from a wide range of public sources. COLD Cases reformats CourtListener's [bulk data](https://www.courtlistener.com/help/api/bulk-data) so that all of the semantic information about each legal decision (the authors and text of majority and dissenting opinions; head matter; and substantive metadata) is encoded in a single record per decision, with extraneous data removed. Serving in the traditional role of libraries as a standardization steward, the Harvard Library Innovation Lab is maintaining this [open source](https://github.com/harvard-lil/cold-cases-export) pipeline to consolidate the data engineering for preprocessing caselaw so downstream machine learning and natural language processing projects can use consistent, high quality representations of cases for legal understanding tasks. Prepared by the [Harvard Library Innovation Lab](https://lil.law.harvard.edu) in collaboration with the [Free Law Project](https://free.law/). --- ## Links - [Data nutrition label](https://datanutrition.org/labels/v3/?id=c29976b2-858c-4f4e-b7d0-c8ef12ce7dbe) (DRAFT). ([Archive](https://perma.cc/YV5P-B8JL)). - [Pipeline source code](https://github.com/harvard-lil/cold-cases-export) --- ## Summary - [Formats](#formats) - [File structure](#file-structure) - [Data dictionary](#data-dictionary) - [Notes on appropriate use](#appropriate-use) --- ## Format [Apache Parquet](https://parquet.apache.org/) is binary format that makes filtering and retrieving the data quicker because it lays out the data in columns, which means columns that are unnecessary to satisfy a given query or workflow don't need to be read. Hugging Face's [Datasets](https://huggingface.co/docs/datasets/index) library is an easy way to get started working with the entire dataset, and has features for loading and streaming the data, so you don't need to store it all locally or pay attention to how it's formatted on disk. [☝️ Go back to Summary](#summary) --- ## Data dictionary Partial glossary of the fields in the data. | Field name | Description | | --- | --- | | `judges` | Names of judges presiding over the case, extracted from the text. | | `date_filed` | Date the case was filed. Formatted in ISO Date format. | | `date_filed_is_approximate` | Boolean representing whether the `date_filed` value is precise to the day. | | `slug` | Short, human-readable unique string nickname for the case. | | `case_name_short` | Short name for the case. | | `case_name` | Fuller name for the case. | | `case_name_full` | Full, formal name for the case. | | `attorneys` | Names of attorneys arguing the case, extracted from the text. | | `nature_of_suit` | Free text representinng type of suit, such as Civil, Tort, etc. | | `syllabus` | Summary of the questions addressed in the decision, if provided by the reporter of decisions. | | `headnotes` | Textual headnotes of the case | | `summary` | Textual summary of the case | | `disposition` | How the court disposed of the case in their final ruling. | | `history` | Textual information about what happened to this case in later decisions. | | `other_dates` | Other dates related to the case in free text. | | `cross_reference` | Citations to related cases. | | `citation_count` | Number of cases that cite this one. | | `precedential_status` | Constrainted to the values "Published", "Unknown", "Errata", "Unpublished", "Relating-to", "Separate", "In-chambers" | | `citations` | Cases that cite this case. | | `court_short_name` | Short name of court presiding over case. | | `court_full_name` | Full name of court presiding over case. | | `court_jurisdiction` | Code for type of court that presided over the case. See: [court_jurisdiction field values](#court_jurisdiction-field-values) | | `opinions` | An array of subrecords. | | `opinions.author_str` | Name of the author of an individual opinion. | | `opinions.per_curiam` | Boolean representing whether the opinion was delivered by an entire court or a single judge. | | `opinions.type` | One of `"010combined"`, `"015unamimous"`, `"020lead"`, `"025plurality"`, `"030concurrence"`, `"035concurrenceinpart"`, `"040dissent"`, `"050addendum"`, `"060remittitur"`, `"070rehearing"`, `"080onthemerits"`, `"090onmotiontostrike"`. | | `opinions.opinion_text` | Actual full text of the opinion. | | `opinions.ocr` | Whether the opinion was captured via optical character recognition or born-digital text. | ### court_type field values | Value | Description | | --- | --- | | F | Federal Appellate | | FD | Federal District | | FB | Federal Bankruptcy | | FBP | Federal Bankruptcy Panel | | FS | Federal Special | | S | State Supreme | | SA | State Appellate | | ST | State Trial | | SS | State Special | | TRS | Tribal Supreme | | TRA | Tribal Appellate | | TRT | Tribal Trial | | TRX | Tribal Special | | TS | Territory Supreme | | TA | Territory Appellate | | TT | Territory Trial | | TSP | Territory Special | | SAG | State Attorney General | | MA | Military Appellate | | MT | Military Trial | | C | Committee | | I | International | | T | Testing | [☝️ Go back to Summary](#summary) ## Notes on appropriate use When using this data, please keep in mind: * All documents in this dataset are public information, published by courts within the United States to inform the public about the law. **You have a right to access them.** * Nevertheless, **public court decisions frequently contain statements about individuals that are not true**. Court decisions often contain claims that are disputed, or false claims taken as true based on a legal technicality, or claims taken as true but later found to be false. Legal decisions are designed to inform you about the law -- they are not designed to inform you about individuals, and should not be used in place of credit databases, criminal records databases, news articles, or other sources intended to provide factual personal information. Applications should carefully consider whether use of this data will inform about the law, or mislead about individuals. * **Court decisions are not up-to-date statements of law**. Each decision provides a given judge's best understanding of the law as applied to the stated facts at the time of the decision. Use of this data to generate statements about the law requires integration of a large amount of context -- the skill typically provided by lawyers -- rather than simple data retrieval. To mitigate privacy risks, we have filtered out cases [blocked or deindexed by CourtListener](https://www.courtlistener.com/terms/#removal). Researchers who require access to the full dataset without that filter may rerun our pipeline on CourtListener's raw data. [☝️ Go back to Summary](#summary)