Projects

The San Francisco Superior Court is unusually open among California superior courts: its public site lets users look up civil cases by case number or party name, and its Register of Actions and almost all civil case documents are viewable online. Nonetheless, the limitations on these searches make it mostly useless for, for example, a pro se litigant looking for form motions or a researcher attempting to substantiate trends.

Besides the unavailability of other search fields, the case records and document images are not available as a bulk export. They sit behind the court portal's CAPTCHA and session flow, so I have every CAPTCHA presented to me using a desktop and mobile interface, allowing a headless browser to capture them from live browser sessions and preserve docket information and contents for each case. The viewer adds numerous features, including document text search, case diagrams, deadline tables or timelines, etc. Litigants, attorneys, and judges each have profiles allowing lookup of all documents filed by or on behalf of them, as well as the cases and rulings associated with them.

I once took a class with Judge Bishay of the Alameda Superior Court, who said judges in Southern California generally award custody to the mother, while judges in Northern California generally award it equally. Because California state courts do not generally publish their decisions online, there is essentially no way to empirically verify trends like this without access to privileged information.

Los Angeles, Orange, Alameda, and Riverside charge for online name searches; several courts also charge for document images. But there is one infrequent exception: tentative rulings. These tentative rulings, which usually become the decision of the Court, are usually freely available and are usually posted as PDFs or portal pages, then purged or displaced after the hearing. For many counties, therefore, tentative rulings are the best public record of how specific judges apply the law. I have therefore compiled as many records of these rulings as are available, and have set up routines to automatically comb more when possible.