Caselaw Access Project: 6.7 Million U.S. Court Decisions Over 360 Years

Harvard Law Library and Ravel Law digitized 6.7 million U.S. court decisions spanning 360 years of legal history. The collection includes state and federal written court decisions of common law, derived from over 40 million digitized pages of official reports.

Use Cases

• Training legal-specific language models using full-text court decisions
• Longitudinal analysis of legal language and precedent evolution over 360 years
• Automated citation extraction and legal network analysis across state and federal jurisdictions

Strengths

• 6.7 million unique legal cases
• 360-year temporal span from 1664 to the present
• Digitized from 40 million pages of official law reports
• CC0 1.0 public domain dedication

Limitations

• Potential OCR errors in older historical volumes digitized from physical paper
• Limited to written opinions, excluding trial transcripts and evidence
• Geographic focus is strictly limited to the United States

Provenance

Source

Harvard Law Library and Ravel Law

Collection Method

Digitization of physical court reports and official law volumes

Time Range

1664-2024

Freshness

Last updated in March 2024; historical coverage is static based on the digitization of physical volumes.

Geography

United States