Court Websites

This page keeps track of the progress of each court and its scrapers for various objects like opinions and oral arguments. It is broken into three sections:

Federal and Tribal Courts
State and Territorial Courts
Technique Notes

In theory all courts with completed scrapers should be marked as DONE. Once in a while, something is out of sync. You can also see the courts that have been deployed on CourtListener.

This page is a wiki. Please feel free to edit it as you work.

Federal and Tribal Courts

Federal Circuit Courts

DONE Opinion scrapers for all Federal Circuit Courts.
DONE Oral Argument scrapers for all (nine) Federal Circuit Courts that support it:
- DONE 1st Circuit: RSS files are in form: http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/files/audio/##-####.mp3
- IMPOSSIBLE 2d Circuit: None that I can find.
- DONE, EXCEPT BACKSCRAPER 3rd Circuit: Last 7 days are listed. Files are in form: http://www.ca3.uscourts.gov/oralargument/audio/##-####PlaintiffvDefendant.wma
  - Entire archive listed here: http://www.ca3.uscourts.gov/oralargument/ListArgumentsAll.aspx
- DONE 4th Circuit: HTML, RSS
- DONE 5th Circuit: files are in form: http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/OralArgRecordings/09/##-#####_M-D-YYYY.wma
- IMPOSSIBLE 6th Circuit: None that I can find.
- DONE 7th Circuit: Past week. Files are in form: http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/fdocs/docs.fwx?submit=showbr&shofile=##-####_001.mp3
- DONE 8th Circuit: Files are in form: http://8cc-www.ca8.uscourts.gov/OAaudio/2010/2/######.MP3 (case number w/o hyphen)
- DONE 9th Circuit: files are linked to in form: http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/media/view_subpage.php?pk_id=0000005305 (random #?) and then on a subsequent page: http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/media/2010/04/09/##-#####.wma

Federal District Courts

Most Federal District Courts are going to be handled by the WrittenOpinions report provided by PACER. However, some District Courts have an opinions page that may be preferable or contain different material. We'll list those here:
- DONE District Court of D.C. (2014 page; set up a year variable in main scraper)
- DONE District Court of D.C. (everything for backscraper)

Federal Courts of Special Jurisdiction

Patent Trial and Appeal Board
U.S. GAO
DONE Merit Systems Protection Board (Precedential) and Non-precedential
DONE U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces
Judicial Panel On Multidistrict Litigation (will need to use PACER as filing date not available otherwise)
DONE-ISH U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims
- (except annual zip files of opinions from 1989-1999 without metadata which are also available.)
DONE U.S. Court of Federal Claims
DONE U.S. Court of International Trade
DONE U.S. Tax Court

Federal Bankruptcy Appellate Panels

IMPOSSIBLE 1st Cir. BAP The only way to get date of opinion publication is to use their search interface and to ensure you get less than the max of 200 results, enter "96" "97" "98" ... "11" "12"... in the "Case number begins with" field. Unfortunately these searches do not create a stable URL.
UNAVAILABLE 8th Cir. BAP We already get these opinions from the regular 8th Cir. page, but they are not clearly designated as BAP opinions there. This link to the BAP court seems promising, but the latest case it has is from 2012. It appears we can't do any better with this.
DONE 9th Cir. BAP Seems their new opinions are (also?) on this part of the ca9 site.
DONE 10th Cir. BAP (poor metadata; only lists case number, does not provide case name or date; they do have a plain text file that appears to provide this metadata for at least the most recent case, maybe the most recent week, not clear, and by surfing directories one could get a "modified date" that is probably the opinion date, but who knows, and even then you'd still have no case name.)

Administrative Boards

Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (precedential)
DONE Board of Veterans' Appeals
IN PROGRESS Board of Immigration Appeals

Tribal Courts

Assiniboine & Sioux Montana Law Library (not sure if updated or historical only)
Cherokee Nation Multiple pages appears to cover decades of Judicial Appeals Tribunal and Supreme Court Opinions
Confederated Salish & Kootenai Montana Law Library (not sure if updated or historical only)
Crow Montana Law Library (not sure if updated or historical only)
Grand Ronde (Javascript-based file folder system)
Ho-Chunk Nation (image-based pdfs)
- Ho-Chunk Nation Supreme Court
- Ho-Chunk Nation Trial Court
  - Ho-Chunk Nation Trial Court Redistricting and Reapportionment Cases
Oneida Reporter (1992-2008) Oneida Trial and Appellate Opinions (2009-2010)
Tribal Court Clearinghouse (2700+ opinions can be found searching for 'court')
more...

Military Court

U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals (Opinions, Memorandum Opinions, and Summary Dispositions)
Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals
U.S. Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals
Coast Guard Court of Criminal Appeals
Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals

State and Territorial Courts

State Appellate Courts

Status of State Courts

DONE Alabama
DONE Alaska
- xpath examples of child, descendant, following-sibling
- Multiple opinions listed under a single date
- Assumes precedential
DONE Arizona
- Titlecase used on case_names field
- xpath examples of 'contains @id'
- Arizona Court of Appeals
  - DONE Division 1
  - Division 2 - TODO (Brian and Deb worked on this but ultimately could not figure it out. Would get fewer old opinions, but a more reasonable page by using their RSS feed.)
- DONE Arizona Tax Court TODO
DONE Arkansas -
- Titlecase used on judges field
- xpath examples all use @class=
- HTML Element converted to string
- Assumes precedential
- Court of Appeals merely points to different URL
DONE Arkansas Court of Appeals
- Extends ark.py
DONE California
- RegEx used for case_names
- Replaces abbreviation of 'People' in case_names
- Handles multiple date formats
- Assumes precedential
- Courts of Appeal scrapers just add 'division' metadata
- Separate page for non-precedential opinions assumes non-precedential
DONE California Court of Appeals w/various divisions
DONE Colorado
- Court-provided pdf announcement difficult to work with
- Contact in mid-2013 yielded no change
- Need to use state bar page
- State Bar page for Court of Appeals TODO but HARD (Check with Mike if you want to work on this one.)
DONE Connecticut
- Daily page + annual archive TODO
- Archive pages list multiple opinions under one date; see Alaska for example scraper.
DONE Delaware Supreme Court
- DONE Delaware Lower Courts
DONE District of Columbia
DONE Florida
- Lists multiple opinions under each date (see alaska)
- Many opinions are accompanied by revised opinions or separate orders that are not hyperlinked with their case name. Somewhat similar to padding strategy in /federal/district/dcd could be used.
DONE Georgia -
- Appears to be hand-written HTML with numerous mistakes that make accurate parsing a challenge.
Georgia Appeals Court
- May require a POST, otherwise looks easy.
DONE Hawaii
DONE Hawaii Appellate
DONE Idaho
- DONE Idaho Civil
- DONE Idaho Criminal
- DONE Idaho Court Appeals Civil
- DONE Idaho Court Appeals Criminal -
- DONE Idaho Unpublished
DONE Illinois Supreme
DONE Illinois Appeals
DONE Indiana:
- DONE Indiana Supreme
- DONE Indiana Court of Appeals
- DONE Indiana Tax Court
DONE Iowa Supreme
- Releases opinions on Fridays and makes a separate page for each release date.
DONE Iowa Appeals
DONE Kansas Supreme and Appellate
DONE Kentucky Supreme and Appellate
- This uses the venerable dtsearch on the backend, which will return everything if you search for 'xfirstword'. Unfortunately, the name of the case is not included in this, making it nearly useless. Good news! You can get the case name from a separate system!
DONE Louisiana
- Only provides results by search query, but a complete result set can be found with the following query: "court OR louisiana OR facts OR page OR district OR circuit OR state OR see". Those are among the top non-stopwords in CourtListener
DONE Maine
- Backscrapers to 1997 possible, but errors in handwritten HTML requires attention
DONE Maryland
DONE Maryland Court of Special Appeals
DONE Massachusetts
DONE Michigan
DONE Minnesota -
- Source can be this or this (research needed).
- Oral arg videos
DONE Mississippi
- Completed by Raymond Yee
- Uses date-based URLs and beginning of year files.
DONE Missouri -
- Supreme Court
- Court of Appeals
- Completed by Ben Cassidy
- Uses date-based URLs
DONE Montana
- Has extremely long URL. See file for details.
- Completed by mlr
DONE Nebraska
DONE Nebraska Court of Appeals
DONE Nevada
DONE New Hampshire
- Contains a fragment of code, but nothing to get excited about.
DONE New Jersey Published
- Uses dynamic XPath queries to vary the scrapers for this and the NJ Super Ct scraper
New Jersey Unpublished
DONE New Jersey Super Court Appellate Division
DONE New Mexico
DONE New Mexico Court of Appeals
DONE New York
DONE North Carolina:
- DONE North Carolina
- DONE North Carolina Court of Appeals
DONE North Dakota
- Shows how two example files can be used for extensive testing.
DONE North Dakota Court of Appeals
DONE Ohio
DONE Oklahoma
DONE Oregon
DONE Pennsylvania
DONE Rhode Island
DONE South Carolina
DONE South Dakota
DONE Tennessee
DONE Tennessee Criminal Appellate Court
DONE Tennessee Court of Appeals
DONE Texas
- DONE Texas Appellate Divisions
DONE Utah
DONE Vermont
DONE Virginia
DONE Virginia Court of Appeals
DONE Washington
- Link requires numerous parameters -- see file for details.
DONE Washington Court of Appeals
- Same URL as Wash, but with different parameters.
DONE West Virginia
DONE Wisconsin
DONE Wyoming

Status of U.S. Territories Courts

American Samoa
Guam Backscrapers to 1996 possible.
Northern Marianas Islands
- Supreme Court Backscrapers to 1989 possible.
- Superior Court
Puerto Rico (en espanol)
U.S. Virgin Islands Backscrapers to 2007 possible. Unpublished opinions also available.
- U.S. Virgin Islands Superior Court

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