Re: pacer program

[Stephen Schultze <xxxxxxxxxx@cyber.law.harvard.edu>]

I've got a quickie for Tim.  How do you get the info for your case  
listings, and are they definitely exhaustive back to 2004?  Do you  
have a special XML feed from the PACER folks or do you just somehow  
parse the site?  If the answer is the former, there a special  
agreement involved?

And a quick follow-up for Carl: I believe we already have the "magic  
pacer header" turned on.  If it appears that this is not the case,  
please let us know.

On Sep 6, 2008, at 7:03 PM, Carl Malamud wrote:
> Tim Stanley (who drains pacer at Justia on a proxy basis) and John  
> Joergensen (librarian at Rutgers who is organizing the court  
> reporters on the east coast), please meet two very talented new  
> recruits, certified MIT rocket scientists.  ;)
>
> Aaron and Stephen have decided to adopt a local district court and  
> then take advantage of the local pacer "public" trial to  
> systematically grab all opinions for their jurisdiction and then  
> put them on bulk.resource.org.  I've given Aaron an account.  Once  
> we have an archive of their data, we'll scrub it for SSNs, then  
> figure out how to inform the chief judge that we have his data  
> available if he wants it.
>
> Tim, can you review sample docs that they harvest?  John, I wanted  
> to make you aware we have a couple ringers helping kick this off.   
> Both these guys are highly clueful.  I've asked them to a) turn on  
> the magic pacer header on the top of the pdf and b) embed the  
> information we need for a unique id in the metadata for the pdf file.
>
> Carl
>
> On Sep 6, 2008, at 3:57 PM, Aaron Swartz wrote:
>
> > Can you introduce us to Tim Stanley? Schultze is trying to figure out
> > which cases to focus on with his Thumb Drive Corps members and is
> > looking at the list of case names in Justia and wondering how it was
> > generated. Perhaps Tim can also review some sample output and make
> > sure we're getting the right stuff.