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What is This?

Juriscraper is a scraper library started many years ago that gathers judicial opinions, oral arguments, and PACER data in the American court system. It is currently able to scrape:

• a variety of pages and reports within the PACER system
• opinions from all major appellate Federal courts
• opinions from all state courts of last resort except for Georgia (typically their "Supreme Court")
• oral arguments from all appellate federal courts that offer them

Juriscraper is part of a two-part system. The second part is your code, which calls Juriscraper. Your code is responsible for calling a scraper, downloading and saving its results. A reference implementation of the caller has been developed and is in use at CourtListener.com <https://www.courtlistener.com>. The code for that caller can be found here <https://github.com/freelawproject/courtlistener/blob/main/cl/scrapers/management/commands/cl_scrape_opinions.py>. There is also a basic sample caller included in Juriscraper <https://github.com/freelawproject/juriscraper/blob/main/sample_caller.py>__ that can be used for testing or as a starting point when developing your own.

Some of the design goals for this project are:

• extensibility to support video, oral argument audio, etc.
• extensibility to support geographies (US, Cuba, Mexico, California)
• Mime type identification through magic numbers
• Generalized architecture with minimal code repetition
• XPath-based scraping powered by lxml's html parser
• return all meta data available on court websites (caller can pick what it needs)
• no need for a database
• clear log levels (DEBUG, INFO, WARN, CRITICAL)
• friendly as possible to court websites

Installation & Dependencies

First step: Install Python 3.11+, then:

Install the dependencies

On Ubuntu based distributions/Debian Linux::

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt-dev libyaml-dev

On Arch based distributions::

sudo pacman -S libxml2 libxslt libyaml

On macOS with Homebrew https://brew.sh::

brew install libyaml

Then install the code

::

pip install juriscraper

You can set an environment variable for where you want to stash your logs (this can be skipped, and /var/log/juriscraper/debug.log will be used as the default if it exists on the filesystem)::

export JURISCRAPER_LOG=/path/to/your/log.txt

Contributing

We welcome contributions! If you'd like to get involved, please take a look at our CONTRIBUTING.md <CONTRIBUTING.md>__ guide for instructions on setting up your environment, running tests, and more.

License

Juriscraper is licensed under the permissive BSD license.

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