More goodies from Justia – they expanded their Federal District Court Filings database. They’ve gone back a few more years and now cover from 2004 to the present. And now, in addition to just seeing information about the case, for some cases you can actually view the opinions, orders, and complete filings. This is awesome!
Cases for which opinions and orders and available have a gavel icon. Cases for with complete filings are noted with a star icon. I suspect that the latter must be very new since I’ve not seen it mentioned anywhere yet.
To see a case with opinions and orders, run a search and select the Only Case Filings with Downloadable Opinions or Orders button. There doesn’t seem to be a button yet for complete filings, but I did happen to find some – run a search for Tivo – the two most recent cases have stars.
Justia is pulling the content from PACER. Although the opinions and orders are available on PACER at no charge, you need an account to access them. With Justia, no account is needed. And for the cases with complete filings, you’re getting a real bargain since normally you’d have to pay for those on PACER. Plus Justia offers more search options than PACER. And, of course, every search is RSS subscribe-able in Justia.
Mary Minow of LawLibrary Blog posted an interview with Nick Moline, programmer at Justia a few weeks ago. Although the database currently goes back to 2004, he said that Justia has plans to add more.