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A fully-searchable and accessible archive of court data including growing repositories of opinions, oral arguments, judges, judicial financial records, and federal filings.
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On Opinion, display button or link to Docket (and vice versa) #805

Open jon-freed opened 6 years ago

jon-freed commented 6 years ago

This is a feature request for the "Opinion" and "Docket" pages. On each, please add a link to the other. For example:

  1. Go to the Opinion at https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2187684/white-family-companies-v-dayton-title-agency-inc/
  2. The Opinion has the attribute "Docket Number: 3:01cv481".
  3. For that attribute, add a button or link to view the docket on the RECAP Archive.
  4. If the docket is not already in the RECAP Archive, then when the button or link is clicked, give the user the choice to "View Docket on PACER".
  5. On the Docket page, add a link to the Opinion(s) pages. (Perhaps Docket pages should have a third tab, "Published Opinions", in addition to the tabs for "Docket Entries" and "Parties and Attorneys". The "Published Opinions" tab would display the opinions that are linked through the relevant "Opinion Cluster".)

Challenges: (based on my amateur understanding of the data model)

  1. While every Opinion is conceptually linked to an Opinion Cluster and Docket, it is not clear to me whether the RECAP Archive actually has a Opinion Cluster record and Docket record in its data for every Opinion. Proposal: When a user clicks on an Opinion's docket number, the Court Listener site will return a page for the actual Docket record if CL has the record, and if CL does not have it, then CL will dynamically generate a page for the Docket that -- like existing Docket pages -- will have a "View Docket on PACER" button. (Secondary challenge: Not sure if you can have a "View Docket on PACER" button/link when you don't yet have the numerical id. For the above case that docket numerical id is in its View Docket on PACER link: https://ecf.ohsd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/DktRpt.pl?69653
  2. An Opinion's "Docket Number" (e.g. "3:01cv481" in above case) frequently will not exactly match the Docket's number ("3:01-cv-00481" in the above case).

Incidentally, it feels like the above Opinion page for the reported opinion should also be visibly linked to the corresponding Docket Item # 114 page for the slip opinion and vice versa.

*Edited to reflect @johnhawkinson comment (thank you) about slip opinion versus reported opinion.

johnhawkinson commented 6 years ago

Also, it feels like the above Opinion page should be consolidated with the corresponding Docket Item # 114 page. It doesn't seem to make much sense to have both, especially when neither one seems to "know" about the other.

Note that one is the Court's slip opinion (DE 114) and the other is the Reported Opinion (468 B.R. 258) which has *261 -style paginations. So it's definitely important to have both. And indeed, they may differ, not only in pagination but also if there are subsequent errata (much more common in appellate slip opinions, IME).

To put it differently, the fact that they don't know about each other is a reason why it's important to have both.

None of this is to take away from your feature request that there be a way to go from Opinions to PACER dockets, for those courts that use PACER.

mlissner commented 6 years ago

This is a good and reasonable suggestion. We'll need to set up some boundaries on when this button shows up so that it doesn't show up for state cases or for old ones that predate PACER, for example. For that, I think we'll want to look at the go-live dates for the PACER instances.

The other question is what happens when the link is clicked. I'd suggest that it should just do a query for that docket number in the RECAP Archive search. So the example given would lead to:

https://www.courtlistener.com/?type=r&order_by=score+desc&docket_number=+3%3A01-cv-481&court=ohsd

Note that I fixed the docket number in there and that I added the jurisdiction.

Then, if nothing comes up, I'd say a simple solution is to add an error message that allows you to make the same (or similar) search over on PACER itself. I'd bet that without too much trouble, we could map our query params over to theirs and provide a pretty useful tool that way. (We should also encourage the user to install RECAP at that point if they don't have it already.)

mlissner commented 6 years ago

(We should also encourage the user to install RECAP at that point if they don't have it already.)

That'll require that we do https://github.com/freelawproject/recap/issues/215, which should be pretty easy, but we gotta do it at some point.

Pascal666 commented 6 years ago

freelawproject/recap#215 appears to be closed now.

I agree with OP, I would have expected https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2539438/in-re-nebuad-device-privacy-litigation/ to have a link to https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/1929649/in-re-nebuad-device-privacy-litigation/

It is also odd how the docket on CL currently links back to the opinion. It is under an "Opinions Outside of RECAP Collection" section, instead of under its document number on the docket. Why is CL downloading the free opinions in a format different than RECAP?

If the docket can link to the opinion, would it really be that hard to have a reciprocal link from the opinion to the docket?