Guest Post: Is the US Supreme Court in lockstep with Congress when it comes to abortion?

This guest post is part of the CAP Research Community Series. This series highlights research, applications, and projects created with Caselaw Access Project data.

Abdul Abdulrahim is a graduate student at the University of Oxford completing a DPhil in Computer Science. His primary interests are in the use of technology in government and law and developing neural-symbolic models that mitigate the issues around interpretability and explainability in AI. Prior to the DPhil, he worked as an advisor to the UK Parliament and a lawyer at Linklaters LLP.

The United States of America (U.S.) has seen declining public support for major political institutions, and a general disengagement with the processes or outcomes of the branches of government. According to Pew’s Public Trust in Government survey earlier this year, “public trust in the government remains near historic lows,” with only 14% of Americans stating that they can trust the government to do “what is right” most of the time. We believed this falling support could affect the relationship between the branches of government and the independence they might have.

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Using Machine Learning to Extract Nuremberg Trials Transcript Document Citations

In Harvard’s Nuremberg Trials Project, being able to link to cited documents in each trial’s transcript is a key feature of site navigation. Each document submitted into evidence by prosecution and defense lawyers is introduced in the transcript and discussed, and the site user is offered the possibility at each document mention to click open the document and view its contents and attendant metadata. While document references generally follow various standard patterns, deviations from the pattern large and small are numerous, and correctly identifying the type of document reference – is this a prosecution or defense exhibit, for example – can be quite tricky, often requiring teasing out contextual clues.

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Guest Post: Creating a Case Recommendation System Using Gensim’s Doc2Vec

This guest post is part of the CAP Research Community Series. This series highlights research, applications, and projects created with Caselaw Access Project data.

Minna Fingerhood graduated from the University of Pennsylvania this past May with a B.A. in Science, Technology, and Society (STSC) and Engineering Entrepreneurship. She is currently a data scientist in New York and is passionate about the intersection of technology, law, and data ethics.

The United States Criminal Justice System is the largest in the world. With more than 2.3 million inmates, the US incarcerates more than 25% of the world’s prison population, even as its general population only accounts for 5%. As a result, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the system has become increasingly congested, inefficient, and at times indifferent.

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A Thought on Digitization

Although it is excellent, and I recommend it very highly, I had not expected Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene to shed light on the Caselaw Access Project. Near the end of the book, he writes,

The study of the humanities is nothing less than the patient nurturing of the roots and heirloom varietals of human symbolic life. This nurturing is a practice not strictly of curation, as many seem to think today, but of active attention, cultivation, making and remaking. It is not enough for the archive to be stored, mapped, or digitized. It must be worked.

The value of the Caselaw Access Project is not primarily in preservation, saving space, or the abstraction of being machine-readable; it is in its new uses, the making of things from the raw material. We at LIL and others have begun to make new things, but we’re only at the beginning. We hope you will join us, and surprise us.

Guest Post: Do Elected and Appointed Judges Write Opinions Differently?

Unlike anywhere else in the world, most judges in the United States today are elected. But it hasn’t always been this way. Over the past two centuries, the American states have taken a variety of different paths, alternating through a variety of elective and appointive methods. Opponents of judicial elections charge that these institutions detract from judicial independence, harm the legitimacy of the judiciary, and put unqualified jurists on the bench; those who support judicial elections counter that, by publicly involving the American people in the process of judicial selection, judicial elections can enhance judicial legitimacy. To say this has been an intense debate of academic, political, and popular interest is an understatement.

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