DocketDrift

A navigator for the public record — state appellate court opinions, organized.

Live: docketdrift.com · Minnesota · New Hampshire · Arizona

State appellate research has historically been dominated by paid databases. DocketDrift collates published opinions from official sources, normalizes them into a structured archive, and makes patterns in judicial decisions easier to find and read together. It is a solo project, and it is free to use.

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What it is not

DocketDrift does not generate text. There is no chat box, no "summarize this for me," no synthesized holdings, no drafted prose anywhere on the site.

That is a deliberate architectural commitment, not a roadmap gap. Generative legal tools have been documented to fabricate case citations at meaningful rates; the failure mode is the same behavior that produces the fluent prose in the first place. A system that cannot produce text cannot produce a fake citation.

Machine learning appears in exactly two places:

1. Semantic search — voyage-law-2 embeddings (1024-dim) stored in MariaDB's native VECTOR column. A query vector is compared to opinion vectors by cosine similarity; the output is an ordered list of real opinion IDs. No text is generated.
2. Tag-suggestion candidates — embeddings rank a fixed vocabulary of editorial tags against each opinion. Above a confidence threshold the tag is auto-applied and marked AUTO_APPLIED for audit; below it, the suggestion enters a human review queue.

Everything else — case number, release date, disposition, panel composition, statute citations, holdings — is deterministic extraction over the published text. Either the pattern matches or it doesn't.

The "The holding" panel is the one surface that looks generated and isn't: it quotes the court's own holding sentence verbatim (courts announce holdings in a small, stable phrase set — "we hold that…", "we conclude that…"). When no such sentence exists, the panel does not render. A blank holding is honest; a guessed one is not.

Query privacy

Users are lawyers, and a lawyer's research trail is work product that can be subpoenaed. The posture is architectural rather than promissory: we cannot produce what we never stored.

• Search is POST, so the query never enters a URL — not the access log, not the proxy log, not a CDN cache key, not browser history, not a shared link.
• The gunicorn access log is query-stripped by a custom log format, and client addresses are recorded only at network granularity (/24 for IPv4, /48 for IPv6) — never a full IP beside a path and a timestamp.
• There is no analytics script. No Google, no self-hosted counter, no third-party beacon; zero visitor JavaScript leaves the site. (An earlier privacy-tuned counter was removed in August 2026 when a scraper demonstrated the signal could be forged anyway — an analytics number a crawler can fake is decoration, and it shipped visitor data to a third party to produce it.)
• No query is ever persisted server-side — not logged, not sessioned, not stored in an analytics row.

Data sources and attribution

DocketDrift stands substantially on the work of the Free Law Project:

• CourtListener supplies the historical backfill and a standing source for ongoing ingestion, via both the REST API and the bulk exports. Reporter citations come from the bulk citations export, and part of the citation graph (605K edges) from the bulk citation-map export, scoped to edges where both endpoints are in this corpus.
• Our own text extraction supplies the larger share of the citation graph: per-state citation parsers read each opinion's body and resolve references against reporter cites, parallel cites, and docket numbers — those edges carry the verbatim citing passage and a treatment classification (followed / distinguished / overruled / criticized / explained).
• Direct ingestion from the courts covers what CourtListener doesn't carry promptly — particularly recent nonprecedential and order opinions, which some courts publish only behind bot-walled archives. Those states are read from the court's own release archive on a weekly schedule.

Free Law Project's eyecite is vendored but not wired into any production code path — a measured bake-off against our extractors found it would add about 1% of resolved citation targets while losing docket-format citations entirely (the only key that reaches unpublished opinions). The write-up lives in the project notes; the decision is revisitable if treatment quality ever outranks graph size.

Corpus

As of August 2026 — 128,000+ opinions across the three live states, all embedded for semantic search.

	Minnesota	New Hampshire	Arizona
Opinions	69,607	20,682	37,834
Date range	1851–present	1843–present	1866–present
Dispositions parsed	97.9%	78.4%	64.2%
Reporter cites	80.4%	90.2%	74.9%
Judges	119	37	169
Panel votes	32,291	17,736	29,195

Plus a 1.45-million-edge citation graph (bulk-derived breadth + text-extracted edges carrying verbatim citing passages and treatment classification) and ~45,000 verbatim-extracted holdings.

Known coverage gaps

Stated plainly, because silence reads as completeness:

• Minnesota 2017–2025 was rebuilt after our upstream source turned out to hold no Minnesota appellate opinions at all for 2020–2022 and sharply reduced coverage from 2017 onward (we reported this upstream, with data). Roughly 9,800 opinions were re-read directly from the State Law Library archive, so every year 2015–2025 now holds about 970–1,435 opinions and 2026 is kept current by our own weekly scraper. Rebuilt years remain substantially covered rather than provably complete: they are short on Supreme Court orders (the archive doesn't publish them) and carry no reporter citations (those arrive via the upstream bulk data, which has nothing for these years) — which is also why the Minnesota reporter-cite figure above reads lower than it used to; the corpus grew by opinions that have no cite to carry.
• Disposition and holding extraction thin out sharply on pre-1980 text, where courts used a different vocabulary ("Exceptions overruled." rather than "Affirmed."). Historic dispositions are transcribed, never mapped — deciding that "exceptions overruled" means "affirmed" is an editorial read of the record, and that call isn't ours to make.
• Editorial review is early. Most records have not been read by a human. Every record publishes its own review status, so this is visible per opinion rather than averaged away.

Stack

Django 5.2 · MariaDB 11.7 (native VECTOR) · PyMySQL · gunicorn · HTMX where it earns its keep. No SPA, no build pipeline, no JavaScript framework. Server-rendered templates and server-rendered SVG charts.

Deployed on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET shared hosting, which shapes several design decisions — no numpy (the FreeBSD wheels are broken), no resident daemons (a ~10-minute wallclock cull), and a 25-second statement timeout that batch commands must lift explicitly.

Local development

Requires Python 3.11 (production pins to it; 3.12+ f-string syntax will not run there). Local dev defaults to SQLite, so no database server is needed.

python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate   # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
cp .env.example .env
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py runserver

State subdomains are resolved by middleware from the Host header, so to see a state site locally, browse via a hostname like mn.localhost:8000 (the apex localhost:8000 renders the state picker).

python manage.py check runs the project's own system checks, including a deploy-blocking guard against multi-line {# … #} template comments — Django only supports those on a single line, and a multi-line one renders as raw page text to the user.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Two standing constraints on any change:

1. Nothing may generate legal text. Extraction and quotation, always.
2. Nothing may create an artifact that could be subpoenaed to reveal what a user was researching. "Store it securely" is not the bar; "never store it" is.

New dependencies with C extensions need a FreeBSD-compatibility check before they can ship.

License

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 — the same license CourtListener uses. If you run a modified version of this software as a network service, the AGPL requires you to offer its source to your users.

Opinion text itself is the public record and is not covered by that copyright.

Contact

Errors in an opinion record, a judge bio, or a search result: [email protected]