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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

#31

Post by sockpuppet69 »

alangibson wrote: post #30
rmbyrro wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the only missing piece for fulltext harassment is a "Google alert" for particular keywords. Put the names you wanna track and receive a delightful alert in your inbox with rocks to throw over other people's roof. EDIT: the tech is great, but I think there should be a record of who is accessing the data, for what purpose, terms for how it can be used in a civil way, and means to go after misuse.

How is harassment as a service not a thing yet? You get a "Google alert" for your target. The service presents you with several buttons: 1. Send an AI written email 2. Post a link to the new info on their Facebook page 3. Tweet an image macro with the incriminating text embedded @ them

No post body was provided.

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

#32

Post by sockpuppet69 »

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?

No post body was provided.

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

#33

Post by ghaff »

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…

I note that this isn't just court cases. I have a long ago (paid) traffic ticket in there--well, not the ticket but a record pointing to a no longer existing ticket. (Maybe that's technically a court case though.) Something I wrote is also in a footnote to a patent filing.

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

#34

Post by alangibson »

vasco wrote: post #19
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.

Nice false equivalence.

Lawyer: duty-bound professional, is an officer of the court, can be publicly disbarred, very expensive degree that needs to be paid off

Some guy on the internet with an axe to grind: ???

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

#35

Post by inetknght »

alangibson wrote: post #30
rmbyrro wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the only missing piece for fulltext harassment is a "Google alert" for particular keywords. Put the names you wanna track and receive a delightful alert in your inbox with rocks to throw over other people's roof. EDIT: the tech is great, but I think there should be a record of who is accessing the data, for what purpose, terms for how it can be used in a civil way, and means to go after misuse.

How is harassment as a service not a thing yet? You get a "Google alert" for your target. The service presents you with several buttons: 1. Send an AI written email 2. Post a link to the new info on their Facebook page 3. Tweet an image macro with the incriminating text embedded @ them

> How is harassment as a service not a thing yet?

What makes you think it isn't?

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

#37

Post by mostlystatic »

It's much more limited in what's covered, but when I had some questions around VAT I found the website of the British and Irish Legal Information Institute really helpful: https://www.bailii.org/

It's noindex, so it would normally be super hard to find the cases if you don't search on the BAILII site directly.

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

#39

Post by dgfitz »

alangibson wrote: post #34
vasco wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nice false equivalence. Lawyer: duty-bound professional, is an officer of the court, can be publicly disbarred, very expensive degree that needs to be paid off Some guy on the internet with an axe to grind: ???

I believe in California you only need to pass the bar to become a lawyer, no expensive degree required.
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