Transforming Court Transparency

Court opacity – keeping data behind an expensive paywall and behind unusable platforms – makes the system less efficient, fair, and accurate. The work we do to increase transparency and data access aims to solve these problems.

SCALES improves court transparency by providing enriched data for the public, policymakers, researchers, and legal professionals.

Our core values are transparency, fairness, efficiency, and accuracy of the courts. We believe that every person has a right to see, understand, and use meaningful and accessible court data and that court data without enrichment and accessibility is neither sufficiently transparent nor public. We aim to build and use our data platforms to ensure the fairness, efficiency, and accuracy of the courts.

Currently, most of the workings of the courts are hidden from the public and researchers. This isn’t because data about courts is non-existent. Instead, the data that exists is often locked behind paywalls and outdated interfaces that prevent users from systematically looking at information about what courts are doing. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to answer basic questions about the courts - such as how judges differ in managing cases, how plaintiffs and defendants maneuver in run-of-the-mill lawsuits, how cases involving corporations differ from those with individuals, or how long it takes to adjudicate different types of criminal cases in different states.

The SCALES OKN began as a federal-funded collaboration of researchers dedicated to solving the access to information problem and has evolved and expanded into the non-profit we are today. As a non-profit, our work continues to center on obtaining public data and building a platform for that data that will empower anyone who has a question about court records to easily find their answer. We continue to collaborate with researchers, policymakers, journalists, and legal professionals to develop a more open and inclusive future for legal data.

Our platform makes public data truly public and the public, policymakers, researchers, and legal professionals to better see and understand the workings of the court system

We built a free data explorer that hosts all our different data for anyone to use. Right now, you can access our Federal data explorer that combines enriched data from all 94 U.S. district courts so that you can ask and answer questions about judges, cases, and outcomes in individual jurisdictions or the entire country with the click of a button.

By making a free account to access the data explorer and subscribing to our newsletter, you can be among the first to know when new types of data have been added to the data explorer and are ready to use.