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

judyrecords.com

211–220 of 289 posts

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

#211

[EDIT] Sorry everyone and thanks everyone for the sentiments. I have been advised not to write anything public about this further. This may be nothing and this will also pass. Unfortunately, I've to delete my comment here. About: IBM seem to have stolen my idea and patented it. I have the full source code, and multiple proofs that I'm the owner.

Lesson learnt, if you have an idea, even most mundane, boring one; don't just go about writing it openly -- there are too many IBMs that will claim as their own.

Do you have any references to the post? Original post/diagrams or other references?

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

#212
I'm always amazed at the rampant patent trolling that happens with deep learning papers/ideas. In this dump, if you search with the names of famous researchers in ML (such as Yoshua Bengio [1] or Yann Lecun [2]) you will find 100s of troll patents citing their work. Not all of them are troll though. Maybe this corpus can be used to automatically identify them, perhaps by merging data from arxiv?

[1] https://www.judyrecords.com/record/vibvgc4w4e2bc [2] https://www.judyrecords.com/record/v9kbckceib0c9

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

#215

Not sure how good this on a "regular citizen" level. I tried several drug/alcohol related incidents that I knew about and nothing came up.

Seems to completely lack records from some states.

I searched a close friend's last name and I got all the stuff I expected - his civil suit, his divorce, his sister's paternity suit, a foreclosure involving his cousin. Seemed very complete.

Searched my own last name and a whole bunch of records of my uncle's various criminal activities came up. Surprisingly what was missing was records of my dad's various criminal activities.

My friend, my dad, and my uncle all live in three different states. My dad is currently incarcerated.

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

#217
post #214

Why patents are there? https://www.judyrecords.com/record/v5j59cngw2c8e

You can think of a patent as a legally binding decision itself, and a kind of legal case in its own right.

Even I can see my gist links in cases https://www.judyrecords.com/record/va3htxa9i5abd

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be more of a problem with the legal system, not this search page.

That's not true. Court records used to be accessible in person only. You would have to be motivated to find anything. This puts everyone's past and often forgotten transgressions on display. This might look cool or even useful to some, but it's straight up immoral.

Mixed feelings on this, and a lot of it unfortunately stems from these systems requiring access in-person only as well as courts generally being inaccessible through FOIA. Had these records been available through FOIA from the beginning, for example, then these records would have gone through a review/redaction process. But, they're being released now, which can many ways be seen as a reaction to the lack of access to this information, generally. The extensive overuse of courts for non-violent cases definitely doesn't help either.

As a researcher, there are deep problems with the inaccessibility of court information in that it prevents the general public from learning about systemic issues, for example identifying extensive abuse by judges (singular, or in a group), or identifying whether bail is applied uniformly.

I don't know what the solution is and things get trickier the more you look at them. Restrictive access isn't a perfect answer, since it allows gatekeeping of those critical. Having talked with lawyers who have access, they basically have to keep completely out of public spot light while they have restrictive access, at the fear of losing it. And our massive systems around incarceration have shown themselves as being uninterested in providing information to those who are critical of them. We've dug ourselves into a pretty deep hole.

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