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. The code for that caller can be found here. There is also a basic sample caller included in Juriscraper 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 guide for instructions on setting up your environment, running tests, and more.
License
Juriscraper is licensed under the permissive BSD license.
2 maintainers
Metadata
2 maintainers
Release files for juriscraper 4.0.1
For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.
Source distribution (sdist)
| File | Size | Uploaded | |
|---|---|---|---|
| juriscraper-4.0.1.tar.gz | 479.3 kB | Details |
Built distribution (wheel)
| File | Interpreter | ABI | Platform | Reset |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| juriscraper-4.0.1-py3-none-any.whl | Python 3 | none | any | Details |
Total release size: 1.2 MB
Release files / juriscraper-4.0.1.tar.gz
| Download URL | juriscraper-4.0.1.tar.gz |
|---|---|
| Size | 479.3 kB |
| Tags | Source |
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Release files / juriscraper-4.0.1-py3-none-any.whl
| Download URL | juriscraper-4.0.1-py3-none-any.whl |
|---|---|
| Size | 720.4 kB |
| Tags | Python 3 |
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Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing? |
No |
| Uploaded via |
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