Open Legal Data Workshop

// Sponsored by NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress //

Earlier this fall, NYC announced a decades-long plan for a progressive and engaging program around the city’s data strategy. It is a reminder that opening data requires sustained effort, and is an indispensable resource for legal hackers.

In legal contexts, the difficulties of accessing case law, opinions, statutes, and other legal instruments digitally and en masse are all too familiar. The Case Law Access Project (CAP) is an oasis in this data desert. Created by the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard in 2018, CAP enables a leap forward for open legal data research: it exposes a mega 6.7 million US state decisions and 1.7 million federal decisions in a semi-structured format.

In this interactive session we’ll:

1. Discuss open data in law and policy contexts,
2. Take a tour of existing experiments within the CAP dataset and review local datasets
3. Identify inquiries that we would like to ask of the data, and aim to answer those inquiries
4. Generate learnings to share with NYC Open Data and our communities

Please bring a charged laptop (or phone!) to fully participate.

Relevant links:
http://www.open-data.nyc/
https://case.law/about/
https://cusp.nyu.edu/