Public-domain · open source
OpenJurist

Attributions & Sources

OpenJurist is assembled from the public domain and from the work of people and institutions who have spent years making the law open. The text of statutes and court opinions is public-domain by nature, but it only reaches the public because libraries digitized it, courts and agencies published it, volunteers transcribed it, and open projects gathered and structured it. This page credits those sources — with our thanks.

Where a source asks for attribution, we honor it: encyclopedic text adapted from Wikipedia is used under CC BY-SA 4.0 and each page links back to its source article; academic datasets are cited as their authors request. If we have missed or miscredited a source, please tell us via the contact page and we will correct it.

Case law

  • Caselaw Access Project (Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab) — public-domain text and metadata for U.S. Reports and the Federal Reporter (F., F.2d, F.3d): case names, dates, citations, parties, and the citation graph.
  • CourtListener, a project of Free Law Project — state and modern federal opinions, parallel citations, case summaries, dockets, and the judge database that backs much of our judge and appointment data.
  • govinfo (U.S. Government Publishing Office) — the official bound U.S. Reports for the Supreme Court: citations, argued and decided dates, vote tallies, opinion authors, and dispositions.
  • The Supreme Court Database (Washington University Law; Harold J. Spaeth et al.) — Supreme Court case disposition, vote breakdowns, and lower-court mapping.

The U.S. Code & statutes

Law dictionaries

  • Case-law dictionary — definitions mined from the public-domain Supreme Court and federal opinion corpus, each linking back to the case that defines the term.
  • Internet Archive — scans of nine public-domain historical law dictionaries (Bouvier, Burrill, Abbott, Stimson, Anderson, Black's 1st ed., Kinney, and others, 1839–1922); each entry links to its source volume.

Judges, courts & people

  • Federal Judicial Center — the Biographical Directory of Article III Federal Judges: appointments, service, education, and demographics.
  • United States Courts (uscourts.gov) — the federal court directory used to verify court websites and electronic filing links.
  • Wikidata (CC0) — structured identifiers and portrait links for judges, presidents, and named statutes.
  • Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons — judge and president biographies and portraits, court seals, and the landmark- and overruled-case lists. Biographical text is used under CC BY-SA 4.0 with a link to each source article; images are credited per file.

Law schools & libraries

  • American Association of Law Libraries and other public law-library directories — the law-library directory data.
  • Wikipedia — ABA-accreditation status and descriptive text for law schools and libraries (CC BY-SA 4.0, linked to source).

Founding documents

  • Project Gutenberg — the full text of the Federalist Papers.
  • Library of Congress — the title-page image of the 1788 first edition of The Federalist. The Declaration, Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Articles of Confederation are public-domain primary texts.

Built with

OpenJurist's rebuild rests on app-agent-io/core, the open-source platform it is built on. Modernizing this site — and bringing it into its current form — would not have been possible without it, and we are grateful to its authors and contributors.

OpenJurist runs on open-source software, with thanks to their maintainers: Nuxt and Vue, Tailwind CSS and Nuxt UI, Drizzle ORM on PostgreSQL, the Bun runtime, OpenSearch, and Lucide and Simple Icons via Iconify.

The Reddit, Notion, and GitHub logos shown on the share/embed controls come from Simple Icons (whose icon artwork is generally released under CC0). Those brand names and logos remain the trademarks of their respective owners and are used only to identify those services; their use here does not imply any affiliation or endorsement.

Financial support

Keeping OpenJurist free to the public costs money, and much of that support comes from book sales through our bookshop, whose catalog is provided in partnership with BooksCloud.io. We are grateful for their support, which lets us keep the law open and freely available to everyone.

A note on licensing

Works of the U.S. government — statutes, court opinions, and federal publications — are in the public domain. Where we use material under a Creative Commons license (chiefly Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, under CC BY-SA 4.0), we attribute the source and link back to it; that material remains under its original license. Wikidata is dedicated to the public domain under CC0. OpenJurist's own contribution — the code, the structuring, and the analysis — is offered in the same open spirit.

This page was last reviewed June 2026.