We have written in the past about RECAP, our project to help make federal court documents more easily accessible. We continue to upgrade the system, and we are eager for your feedback on a new set of functionality.
One of the most-requested RECAP features is a better web interface to the archive. Today we’re releasing an experimental system for searching and browsing, at archive.recapthelaw.org. There are also a couple of extra features that we’re eager to get feedback on. For example, you can subscribe to an RSS feed for any case in order to get updates when new documents are added to the archive. We’ve also included some basic tagging features that lets anybody add tags to any case. We’re sure that there will be bugs to be fixed or improvements that can be made. Please let us know.
The first version of the system was built by an enterprising team of students in Professor Ed Felten’s “Civic Technologies” course: Jen King, Brett Lullo, Sajid Mehmood, and Daniel Mattos Roberts. Dhruv Kapadia has done many of the subsequent updates. The links from the Recap Archive pages point to files on our gracious host, the Internet Archive.
See, for example, the RECAP Archive page for United States of America v. Arizona, State of, et al. This is the Arizona District Court case in which the judge last week issued an order granting injunction against several portions of the controversial immigration law. As you can see, some of the documents have a “Download” link that allows you to directly download the document from the Internet Archive, whereas others have a “Buy from PACER” link because no RECAP users have yet liberated the document.
