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Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

judyrecords.com

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Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#11

Post by anonu »

kyboren wrote: post #3

This is... not great. It's crucial that these records be open to public inspection. But instant full-text search of the entire dockets of 630M cases feels wrong, invasive, and dangerous to me. It's yet another instance of panopticon surveillance now being too cheap to meter. I think our society needs to come to grips with this new reality and figure out what to do about it. Or are we all just cool with this?

I couldn't find my name. And i know it should be in here. So I'm not that worried yet...

Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#12

Post by lazide »

codechad wrote: post #8
kyboren wrote: post #3

This is... not great. It's crucial that these records be open to public inspection. But instant full-text search of the entire dockets of 630M cases feels wrong, invasive, and dangerous to me. It's yet another instance of panopticon surveillance now being too cheap to meter. I think our society needs to come to grips with this new reality and figure out what to do about it. Or are we all just cool with this?

There are public court records (criminal, civil), and there are non-public court records (e.g. sealed - juvenile, divorce, etc.) As far as I can tell, all of this data is of the public nature. While it may feel weird to type in someone's name and see their history with regard to legal filings... that is the society we live in: an open society. Aggregating a number of disconnected data sources for search I think is ab…

FYI, I found a couple folks I know’s divorce records. So I wouldn’t assume those hard and fast rules apply consistently.

Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#13

Post by airstrike »

This seems pretty good at first glance but there's significant room for improvement. Since this is HN, allow me to nitpick...

- "630M" is a big number, sure, but I don't have a sense for what % of total court cases it corresponds to. Is it closer to 10% or 90%? And either way, which ones are included vs. excluded? What was the criteria used? Accessibility, date, costs?

- I get the artistic view behind the choice of typography but the font is just too large. I find myself having to scroll to get just as far as the 5th result. Information density is good in search engines

- The results consist of two pieces: the name of the court (followed by "record", which is unnecessary) and a short snippet, but not the actual name of the case... which is an interesting choice given that the name of the case is stored in a database field as evidenced by the fact that it is in the tag of any detail view

- Also I also think the snippets are too short. Together with the previous point, this site is basically forcing me to click on each potential match to see if it is what I wanted or not

- The URLs are... interesting. Searching for anything takes you to "https://www.judyrecords.com/getSearchResults/?page=1" which does not identify your search. Somehow this is using GET but not storing the form input in the URL but locally somehow... so searching for "foo" in one tab, "bar" in a different tab, and hitting refresh on your "foo" tab will then show "bar" results there. Which is not only "Not Cool", but seems actually harder to accomplish than a straight up form using GET

- And then the actual results have URLs like "https://www.judyrecords.com/record/qxemfajbcae3". I'd be fine with a slug, really, but in 2022 I expect URLs to be API-like

- I can't search for specific cases, e.g. "paramount communications, inc. v. qvc network, inc" returns a bunch of results, none of which are the actual case I'm looking for which is a hugely influential precedent

Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#14

Post by [deleted] »

codechad wrote: post #8
kyboren wrote: post #3

This is... not great. It's crucial that these records be open to public inspection. But instant full-text search of the entire dockets of 630M cases feels wrong, invasive, and dangerous to me. It's yet another instance of panopticon surveillance now being too cheap to meter. I think our society needs to come to grips with this new reality and figure out what to do about it. Or are we all just cool with this?

There are public court records (criminal, civil), and there are non-public court records (e.g. sealed - juvenile, divorce, etc.) As far as I can tell, all of this data is of the public nature. While it may feel weird to type in someone's name and see their history with regard to legal filings... that is the society we live in: an open society. Aggregating a number of disconnected data sources for search I think is ab…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#15

Post by lazide »

mmastrac wrote: post #9
kyboren wrote: post #3

This is... not great. It's crucial that these records be open to public inspection. But instant full-text search of the entire dockets of 630M cases feels wrong, invasive, and dangerous to me. It's yet another instance of panopticon surveillance now being too cheap to meter. I think our society needs to come to grips with this new reality and figure out what to do about it. Or are we all just cool with this?

Don't lawyers already have access to case law like this? I feel like this is not a new thing, but giving access to everyone is novel. I could be wrong on my facts.

Generally you’ve had to pay for an expensive service (Lexus nexus), or go to the courthouse yourself to pull the records. Search was also a bit of a black art.

So generally easy to hide in the noise. Here you can just put in a name, and off you go.

Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#17

Post by richardbarosky »

codechad wrote: post #2

This is amazing. Can you share any info on how you were able to compile so much info from different sources? In my limited experience of hunting for legal filings, it seemed like every court had its own system, with nothing standardized or programmatic. Thanks!

The search uses elasticsearch 7 for full text search. It's been extremely fast and worked very well. You're right court data is scattered across many different systems and needs to be aggregated, which is a difficult process.

Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#18

Post by richardbarosky »

airstrike wrote: post #13

This seems pretty good at first glance but there's significant room for improvement. Since this is HN, allow me to nitpick... - "630M" is a big number, sure, but I don't have a sense for what % of total court cases it corresponds to. Is it closer to 10% or 90%? And either way, which ones are included vs. excluded? What was the criteria used? Accessibility, date, costs? - I get the artistic view behind the choice of t…

Valid criticisms, thanks for pointing them out as areas of improvement. Good question about the % of total cases though I think there are some estimates on that. My guess would maybe be 100M+ cases per year.

Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#19

Post by vasco »

kyboren wrote: post #3

This is... not great. It's crucial that these records be open to public inspection. But instant full-text search of the entire dockets of 630M cases feels wrong, invasive, and dangerous to me. It's yet another instance of panopticon surveillance now being too cheap to meter. I think our society needs to come to grips with this new reality and figure out what to do about it. Or are we all just cool with this?

These records have always been available to people with money to spend on a lawyer with a subscription. So what you're complaining about is that normal people can also access the information now.

Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#20

Post by codechad »

lazide wrote: post #12
codechad wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are public court records (criminal, civil), and there are non-public court records (e.g. sealed - juvenile, divorce, etc.) As far as I can tell, all of this data is of the public nature. While it may feel weird to type in someone's name and see their history with regard to legal filings... that is the society we live in: an open society. Aggregating a number of disconnected data sources for search I think is ab…

FYI, I found a couple folks I know’s divorce records. So I wouldn’t assume those hard and fast rules apply consistently.

Fair enough - in my state they are limited to parties involved and their counsel.

The public can still see the filing and result (when the divorce was granted), but the actual documents are restricted so as not to air all of one's dirty laundry unnecessarily.

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