nswcaselaw 0.1.2

Toolkit for working with NSW CaseLaw decisions

nswcaselaw

A Python toolkit for downloading and extracting textual data from the NSW CaseLaw website at https://www.caselaw.nsw.gov.au/

Usage

Sample usage in Python code or a Jupyter notebook:

from nswcaselaw.search import Search
import json

query = Search(courts=[13], catchwords="succession")

for decision in query.results():
    decision.fetch()
    print(json.dumps(decision.values, indent=2))

CLI tool

To generate a CSV of search results:

nswcaselaw --courts 13 --catchwords succession --output cases.csv

To download complete decisions as JSON documents:

nswcaselaw --courts 13 --catchwords succession --output cases.csv  --download ./decisions

To list available courts and tribunals (NOTE: full web scraping is only tested on Supreme Court decisions):

nswcaselaw --list courts
nswcaselaw --list tribunals

Installation

Follow the instructions at https://docs.conda.io/projects/conda/en/latest/user-guide/install/download.html to install Conda.

To create a conda environment with Jupyter and nswcaselaw:

conda create -n mycaselaw jupyter
conda activate mycaselaw
pip install nswcaselaw

Once the dependencies are installed:

jupyter notebook

will start Jupyter and open a browser. Any notebooks you create in this will be able to import the nswcaselaw module as shown above:

from nswcaselaw.search import Search

To install nswcaselaw without Jupyter, follow the same steps to install Conda, and then create a new environment as follows:

conda create -n mycaselaw
conda activate mycaselaw
pip install nswcaselaw

You should now be able to use the nswcaselaw command from a terminal (on Mac or Linux) or the Anaconda prompt (on Windows).

Acknowledgements

This project is partially funded by a 2022 University of Sydney Research Accelerator (SOAR) Prize awarded to Ben Chen.

Note

This project has been set up using PyScaffold 4.3. For details and usage information on PyScaffold see https://pyscaffold.org/.