"The value of openness lies in the fact that people not actually attending trials can have confidence that standards of fairness are being observed; the sure knowledge that anyone is free to attend gives assurance that established procedures are being followed and that deviations will become known."
CalScrape is a tool for rapidly searching judicial calendars for court hearings of interest. It is primarily geared toward journalists but would also be useful to researchers and interested members of the public. It provides an alternative (and free) way to follow hearings in cases aside from PACER.
As of writing, CalScrape only supports the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (CAND). Ultimately the goal is to extend this to other federal and state courts throughout the United States. A lot of work has been done to make the code modular so that bolting on support for further courts can be as seamless as possible.
CalScrape requires Python 3.6+. It also has several dependencies. Follow the instructions below to install and run CalScrape. This should cover MacOS and most Linux distros; instructions for Windows are not yet available.
- Clone the repository using the URL that appears after clicking "Clone or download"
$ git clone https://github.com/elwha1/calscrape.git
Or you can download the latest release from the releases tab and unzip it
- Move into the CalScrape directory
$ cd calscrape
- Install the software package dependencies
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
You should see a list of packages being installed. You may need to install
pip on your machine if you don't have it already.
CalScrape dependencies can also be installed in a virtual environment using pipenv; to do so navigate to the directory and enter:
$ pipenv install
Once in the file directory, CalScrape can be run via this terminal command:
$ python calscrape.py
You may need to substitute python for python3, depending on your
installation.
CalScrape supports two search modes: keyword and list. The list
mode searches the calendars for all terms stored in the file
user/searchterms.json. Feel free to edit this file to include as many terms
as you want (company names, party names, etc.). Just be cautious to format the
list correctly:
["list", "the", "terms", "like", "this"]
CalScrape is an open source project being developed to further the public interest and increase awareness about the court system. Contributions are welcome. If you encounter an issue, please file it using the issue-tracking tool. If you'd like to contribute or have ideas for how to improve CalScrape, feel free to make a pull request or get in touch.
CalScrape is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License. For more details, see the LICENSE.txt file.