A few years ago, the Library of Congress released a PDF that listed the exact dates that the early Supreme Court Cases were decided. Since the written record only contained the month and year of the decision, this list served as the official record for the cases.
While it was great for the Library of Congress to publish this report, unfortunately they did so in a large PDF rather than a more useful format that could be used by projects such as CourtListener. Attempts to contact the Library of Congress were unable to locate the original version of the document, so at CourtListener we converted the PDF into a CSV file that can be easily read by a computer or imported into a spreadsheet. I’m happy to be releasing this CSV today so that it can be used by others.
The second project we have been working on at CourtListener was to import this data into our system. Today, we finally did that, updating the dates 6,083 early Supreme Court Cases. We used a combination of searching for the case by number, and a statistical analysis of the cases returned by the search. When statistics and search failed, a human (me) made a decision by reviewing the proposed change. At the end of this process, we were able to find and update 96% of the cases identified by the Library of Congress.