All published U.S. court decisions from 1658 to June 2018 are now freely accessible online, thanks to the Caselaw Access Project (CAP), a partnership between Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab and Ravel Law, acquired by LexisNexis.  CAP’s goal is to “make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online, in a consistent digitized format.”  To create this massive collection, law librarians at Harvard digitized roughly 40 million pages of decisions contained in roughly 40,000 bound reporter volumes .

Users can access the data via an open-source API (application programming interface). CAP provides a Beginner’s introduction to API along with usage examples that explain how to retrieve cases by ID or through simple full-text searches.

For more information, see Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites blog post and the CAP website.