Gather and host older SCOTUS filings and dockets

[mlissner]

This is a high-level ticket to discuss and document a project to eventually gather and host Supreme Court content. @rlfordon and @zvisrosen are masters here, and I'm just putting some notes into this ticket so we can think about it more in the future.

The way I think about adding data sources is that there are dockets, documents, and parties. When it comes to SCOTUS, some of this stuff is available:

Dockets

These are available from:

• As PDFs from ProQuest (Supreme Court Insight) dates unknown;
• As HTML from NARA, dates unknown;
• As a DB dump (?) from NARA, dates unknown; and
• As magnetic tapes from a contact (see main Slack channel from 2024-07-17), who is gathering them from 1983 to mid-90's.

Some of these dockets are apparently hand-written, so that's fun, and I don't think even AI can handle that yet. (CA9 has handwritten ones too in a closet, I hear.)

NARA catalogs are here:

• https://catalog.archives.gov/id/1524561
• https://catalog.archives.gov/search?recordGroupNumber=267&objectType=ascii%2Chtml

Documents

These are available from:

• West and Lexis, dates unknown
• Internet Archive is doing a scanning project from microfiche

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Also of note, a colleague writes:

I suspect this is duplicative of the Gale db (Making of Modern Law: Supreme Court Records and Briefs). Lexis has their own project which they're doing at LoC. A lot of this is also on Google Books.

So I think this needs some more research, but these are the notes I've got so far. What I'm trying to figure out is whether FLP doing something with this is useful to anybody or just purely duplicative. And if the latter, whether we should do it anyway to create an important resource that would otherwise only be behind paywalls.

High level questions I have:

• What exactly are the other orgs doing and where are the gaps?
  • Is their data available via API? Is that useful?
  • Is their data searchable? Is that useful?
  • Is their data complete? Can it be? Does that matter?
• What can and can't we get in terms of content?
• How much work would it take to digitize this content to our standards (maybe AI can make sense of typed scans but not handwritten ones)?
• How much content are we talking about, roughly?

Big picture, if we're going to do this, we'll need to know how much money it'll cost. Is it two developers for five years, or one developer for a few months? Probably something in between, but the budget is going to be the hard part at the beginning.

[rlfordon]

This guide (created by a former colleague) should be helpful in figuring out where else this stuff is, and potentially some other sources. https://libguides.law.ucla.edu/scotus/dockets

Here's where you can find briefs for example:

• ProQuest Supreme Court Insight (1897-2024) - Complete online collection of full opinions from Supreme Court argued cases, including decisions, dockets, oral arguments, joint appendices and amicus briefs.
• United States Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978 (Gale) - Full text and searchable index of U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs.
• Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States: Constitutional Law - electronic access via HathiTrust, as well as physical copies
• Lexis: Briefs, Petitions, and Joint Appendices - Selected coverage begins with 1936 (briefs and joint appendices) and petitions (1999).
• Westlaw: Briefs, Petitions and Joint Appendices - Selected coverage begins with 1930 (briefs), 1985 (petitions), and 1982 (joint appendices)