THE SCALES PROJECT: MAKING FEDERAL COURT RECORDS FREE

David L Schwartz, Kat M. Albrecht, Adam Robert Pah, Christopher A. Cotropia, Amy Kristin Sanders, Sarath Sanga*, Charlotte S. Alexander, Luís A.N. Amaral, Zachary D. Clopton, Anne M. Tucker, Thomas W. Gaylord, Scott G. Daniel, Nathan Dahlberg

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

—Federal court records have been available online for nearly a quarter century, yet they remain frustratingly inaccessible to the public. This is due to two primary barriers: (1) the federal government’s prohibitively high fees to access the records at scale and (2) the unwieldy state of the records themselves, which are mostly text documents scattered across numerous systems. Official datasets produced by the judiciary, as well as third-party data collection efforts, are incomplete, inaccurate, and similarly inaccessible to the public. The result is a de facto data blackout that leaves an entire branch of the federal government shielded from empirical scrutiny. In this Essay, we introduce the SCALES project: a new data-gathering and data-organizing initiative to right this wrong. SCALES is an online platform that we built to assemble federal court records, systematically organize them and extract key information, and—most importantly—make them freely available to the public. The database currently covers all federal cases initiated in 2016 and 2017, and we intend to expand this coverage to all years. This Essay explains the shortcomings of existing systems (such as the federal government’s PACER platform), how we built SCALES to overcome these inadequacies, and how anyone can use SCALES to empirically analyze the operations of the federal courts. We offer a series of exploratory findings to showcase the depth and breadth of the SCALES platform. Our goal is for SCALES to serve as a public resource where practitioners, policymakers, and scholars can conduct empirical legal research and improve the operations of the federal courts. For more information, visit www.scales-okn.org.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)23-64
Number of pages42
JournalNorthwestern University law review
Volume119
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024

Funding

The SCALES Open Knowledge Network, an organization funded by the National Science Foundation, is dedicated to transforming the accessibility and transparency of federal courts.76 One of the primary goals, as the name suggests, is to establish to an open knowledge network (OKN). By definition, an OKN is freely available to all stakeholders, including the researchers who will help push this technology further. It is a nonproprietary public\u2013private development effort that spans the entire data science community. The result of an OKN is an open, shared infrastructure. The formation of the SCALES OKN was driven by a clear need: the unavailability of raw data from the U.S. federal courts for comprehensive research purposes. SCALES brought together an interdisciplinary team with expertise in law, social science, journalism, and data and computer science, with the goal of making federal court data freely and easily accessible.77 The authors would like to thank the Symposium organizers and editors of the Northwestern University Law Review for their tireless work and support.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Law

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