Access to Justice Network Conference 2026

Name: Unlocking the Courthouse: Opening Access to Court Data
Start: 2026-10-22T12:30:00-0400
End: 2026-10-22T13:25:00-0400

Unlocking the Courthouse: Opening Access to Court Data

Thursday October 22, 2026 12:30pm - 1:25pm EDT

Cincinnati Convention Center

Sixty-six million cases flow through state courts every year, generating data that could reveal how well the justice system is performing, where it's failing, and who is being underserved. In theory, this is public data. In practice, accessing it requires navigating a gauntlet of technical barriers — robots.txt files with crawl delays measured in days, anti-bot technology designed to block the exact kind of automated analysis that would make the data useful — and legal barriers — terms of service that prohibit machine learning, court policies that actively deter technology use on public documents. The result is that the public's own court data is effectively locked away from the researchers, advocates, journalists, technologists, and even practitioners themselves, who could use it to improve the system.
This conversation hour opens with a live demonstration of what becomes possible when court data is open: a dashboard built from South Carolina probate court records showing how estate processing efficiency varies dramatically by county — visualized through geospatial mapping that makes performance differences impossible to ignore. The demo shows both what the data reveals and what it took to get it. Then the conversation turns to the barriers. A deep dive into the technical and legal obstacles — the specific mechanisms courts use, intentionally or not, to prevent public access to public data — surfaces a problem that most access-to-justice professionals don't know exists until they try to build something that requires court records. A collaborative model involving multiple organizations across criminal and civil court data shows one pathway through the barriers.
This session is for anyone who has tried to work with court data and hit a wall, anyone building tools that depend on court records, and anyone who believes that measuring court performance is a prerequisite for improving it. Bring your own court data access stories — the barriers you've encountered, the workarounds you've found, and the questions you can answer and those you still can't because the data aren’t accessible. Leave with a clearer picture of the landscape and use cases of available data, connections to others working on the problem, and strategies for advocating open data in your jurisdiction.

Speakers

David Caraway

Measures for Justice / Code with the Carolinas (The Social Good Fund)

Dave Caraway is a self-represented litigant and technologist. Dave organizes the OpenCourts project, a volunteer-run project dedicated to making court data accessible. He brings twenty years of experience leading software teams and previously served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 12:30pm - 1:25pm EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Conversation Hour

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Access to Justice Network Conference 2026

David Caraway

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Access to Justice Network Conference 2026

David Caraway

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