This is the source code for case.law, a website written by the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab to manage and serve court opinions. Other than several cases used for our automated testing, this repository does not contain case data. Case data may be obtained through the website.

• Project Background
• The Data
  • Format Documentation and Samples
  • Obtaining Real Data
  • Reporting Data Errors
  • Errata
• The Capstone Application
• CAPAPI
• Installing Capstone and CAPAPI
  • Hosts Setup
  • Manual Local Setup
    • Install global system requirements
    • Clone the repository
    • Set up python virtualenv
    • Install application requirements
    • Set up the postgres database and load test data
    • Running the capstone server
  • Docker Setup
• Administering and Developing Capstone
  • Testing
  • Requirements
  • Applying model changes
  • Stored Postgres functions
  • Running Command Line Scripts
  • Local debugging tools
  • Download real data locally
  • Model versioning
  • Working with javascript
  • Elasticsearch
• Documentation
• Examples

The Caselaw Access Project is a large-scale digitization project hosted by the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab. Visit case.law for more details.

1. Format Documentation and Samples
2. Obtaining Real Data
3. Reporting Data Errors
4. Errata

The output of the project consists of page images, marked up case XML files, ALTO XML files, and METS XML files. This repository has a more detailed explanation of the format, and two volumes worth of sample data:

CAP Samples and Format Documentation

This data, with some temporary restrictions, is available to all. Please see our project site with more information about how to access the API, or get bulk access to the data:

https://case.law/

This is a living, breathing corpus of data. While we've taken great pains to ensure its accuracy and integrity, two large components of this project, namely OCR and human review, are utterly fallible. When we were designing Capstone, we knew that one of its primary functions would be to facilitate safe, accountable updates. If you find any errors in the data, we would be extraordinarily grateful for your taking a moment to create an issue in this GitHub repository's issue tracker to report it. If you notice a large pattern of problems that would be better fixed programmatically, or have a very large number of modifications, describe it in an issue. If we need more information, we'll ask. We'll close the issue when the issue has been corrected.

These are known issues — there's no need to file an issue if you come across one of these.

• Missing Judges Tag: In many volumes, elements which should have the tag name <judges> instead have the tag name <p>. We're working on this one.
• Nominative Case Citations: In many cases that come from nominative volumes, the citation format is wrong. We hope to have this corrected soon.
• Jurisdictions: Though the jurisdiction values in our API metadata entries are normalized, we have not propagated those changes to the XML.
• Court Name: We've seen some inconsistencies in the court name. We're trying to get this normalized in the data, and we'll also publish a complete court name list when we're done.
• OCR errors: There will be OCR errors on nearly every page. We're still trying to figure out how best to address this. If you've got some killer OCR correction strategies, get at us.

Capstone is a Django application with a PostgreSQL database which stores and manages the non-image data output of the CAP project. This includes:

• Original XML data
• Normalized metadata extracted from the XML
• External metadata, such as the Reporter database
• Changelog data, tracking changes and corrections

CAPAPI is the API with which users can access CAP data.

• Manual Local Setup
• Docker Setup

Add the following to /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1       case.test
127.0.0.1       api.case.test
127.0.0.1       cite.case.test

1. Install global system requirements
2. Clone the repository
3. Set up python virtualenv
4. Install application requirements
5. Set up the postgres database and load test data
6. Running the capstone server

• Python 3.7— While there shouldn't be any issues with using a more recent version, we will only accept PRs that are fully compatible with 3.7.
• MySQL— On Macs with homebrew, the version installed with brew install mysql works fine. On Linux, apt-get does the job
• Redis— (Instructions)
• Postgres > 9.5— (Instructions) For Mac developers, Postgres.app is a nice, simple way to get an instant postgres dev installation.
• Git— (Instructions)

$ git clone https://github.com/harvard-lil/capstone.git

$ cd capstone/capstone  # move to Django subdirectory
$ mkvirtualenv -p python3 capstone

(capstone)$ pip install -r requirements.txt

This will make a virtualenv entitled "capstone." You can tell that you're inside the virtualenv because your shell prompt will now include the string (capstone).

(capstone)$ psql -c "CREATE DATABASE capdb;"
(capstone)$ psql -c "CREATE DATABASE capapi;"
(capstone)$ psql -c "CREATE DATABASE cap_user_data;"
(capstone)$ fab init_dev_db  # one time -- set up database tables and development Django admin user, migrate databases
(capstone)$ fab ingest_fixtures  # load in our test data

(capstone)$ fab run      # start up Django server

Capstone should now be running at 127.0.0.1:8000.

We support local development via docker compose. Docker setup looks like this:

$ docker-compose up -d
$ docker-compose exec db psql --user=postgres -c "CREATE DATABASE capdb;"
$ docker-compose exec db psql --user=postgres -c "CREATE DATABASE capapi;"
$ docker-compose exec db psql --user=postgres -c "CREATE DATABASE cap_user_data;"
$ docker-compose exec web fab init_dev_db
$ docker-compose exec web fab ingest_fixtures
$ docker-compose exec web fab import_web_volumes
$ docker-compose exec web fab run

Capstone should now be running at 127.0.0.1:8000.

If you are working on frontend, you probably want to run yarn as well. In a new shell:

$ docker-compose exec web yarn serve

Tip— these commands can be shortened by adding something like this to .bash_profile:

alias d="docker-compose exec"
alias dfab="d web fab"
alias dyarn="d web yarn"

Or:

alias d="docker-compose exec web"

And then:

$ d fab 
$ d yarn serve

Tip- If docker-compose up -d takes too long to run, you might consider the following:

$ cp docker-compose.override.yml.example docker-compose.override.yml

This override file will point the elasticsearch service to a hello-world image instead of its real settings. Use this override file to override more settings for your own development environment.

• Testing
• Requirements
• Applying model changes
• Stored Postgres functions
• Running Command Line Scripts
• Local debugging tools
• Download real data locally
• Model versioning

We use pytest for tests. Some notable flags:

Run all tests:

(capstone)$ pytest

Run one test:

(capstone)$ pytest -k test_name

Run tests without capturing stdout, to allow debugging with pdb:

(capstone)$ pytest -s

Run tests in parallel for speed:

(capstone)$ pytest -n <number of processes>

Top-level requirements are stored in requirements.in. After updating that file, you should run

(capstone)$ fab pip-compile

to freeze all subdependencies into requirements.txt.

To ensure that your environment matches requirements.txt, you can run

(capstone)$ pip-sync

This will add any missing packages and remove any extra ones.

Use Django to apply migrations. After you change models.py:

(capstone)$ ./manage.py makemigrations

This will write a migration script to cap/migrations. Then apply:

(capstone)$ fab migrate

Some Capstone features depend on stored functions that allow Postgres to deal with XML and JSON fields. See set_up_postgres.py for documentation.

Command line scripts are defined in fabfile.py. You can list all available commands using fab -l, and run a command with fab command_name.

django-extensions is enabled by default, including the very handy ./manage.py shell_plus command.

django-debug-toolbar is not automatically enabled, but if you run pip install django-debug-toolbar it will be detected and enabled by settings_dev.py.

For database versioning we use the Postgres temporal tables approach inspired by SQL:2011's temporal databases.

See this blog post for an explanation of temporal tables and how to use them in Postgres.

We use django-simple-history to manage creation, migration, and querying of the historical tables.

Data is kept in sync through the temporal_tables Postgres extension and the triggers created in our scripts/set_up_postgres.py file.

Installing the temporal_tables extension is recommended for performance. If not installed, a pure postgres version will be installed by set_up_postgres.py; this is handy for development.

We store complete fixtures for about 1,000 cases in the case.law downloads section.

You can download and ingest all volume fixtures from that section with the command fab import_web_volumes, or ingest a single volume downloaded from that section with the command fab import_volume:some.zip.

We use Vue CLI 3 to compile javascript files, so you can use modern javascript and it will be transpiled to support the browsers listed in package.json. New javascript entrypoints can be added to vue.config.js and included in templates with {% render_bundle %}.

If you want to edit javascript files, you will need to install node and the package.json javascript packages:

$ brew install node
$ npm install -g yarn
$ yarn install --frozen-lockfile

You can then run the local javascript development server in a separate terminal window, or in the background:

$ yarn serve

This will cause javascript files to be loaded live from http://127.0.0.1:8080/ and recompiled on save in the background. Your changes should be present at http://127.0.0.1:8000.

Installing node and running yarn serve is not necessary unless you are editing javascript. On a clean checkout, or after shutting down yarn serve and running yarn build, the local dev server will use the compiled production assets. Under the hood, use of the local dev server vs. production assets is controlled by the contents of webpack-stats.json.

Installing packages: You can install new packages with:

$ yarn add --dev package

After changing package.json or yarn.lock, you should run fab update_docker_image_version to ensure that docker users get the updates, but note that Circle CI will take care of building JS assets and updating the Docker image version.

Yarn and docker: yarn will also work inside docker-compose:

$ docker-compose run web yarn build

yarn packages inside docker are stored in /node_modules. The /app/capstone/node_modules folder is just an empty mount to block out any node_modules folder that might exist on the host.

For local dev, Elasticsearch will automatically be started by docker-compose up -d. You can then run fab refresh_case_body_cache to populate CaseBodyCache for all cases, and fab rebuild_search_index to populate the search index.

For debugging, see settings.py.example for an example of how to log all requests to and from Elasticsearch.

It may also be useful to run Kibana to directly query Elasticsearch from a browser GUI:

$ brew install kibana
$ kibana -e http://127.0.0.1:9200

You can then go to Kibana -> Dev Tools to run any of the logged queries, or GET /_mapping to see the search indexes.

This readme, code comments, and the API usage docs are the only docs we have. If you want something documented more thoroughly, file an issue and we'll get back to you.

See the CAP examples repo for some ideas about getting started with this data.