Back in 2018, something remarkable happened. The Caselaw Access Project, part of Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab, completed its three-year project to digitize all U.S. case law — some 6.4 million cases dating all the way back to 1658, a span of 360 years.
It was a massive project that scanned 38.6 million pages from 39,796 law books and converted it all into machine-readable text files, creating a collection that included 6.4 million published cases (and which has continued to grow since then).
The project initially received financial support from legal research startup Ravel Law. After LexisNexis acquired Ravel in 2017, it continued that support.
The goal was to make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public in a standardized digital format. The cases are available to the public through a basic Caselaw page or via bulk downloads.
However, until this month, CAP’s contractual relationship with LexisNexis limited commercial use of the cases.
