Description: This is a bulk open-access dataset in JSON format with the full text of Federal Court of Appeal (Canada) decisions. The process through which data is processed and code snippets for loading the data are available in a repository on the Refugee Law Lab Github.
Data: https://github.com/Refugee-Law-Lab/fca_bulk_data/tree/master/DATA/YEARLY
Code Repository: https://github.com/Refugee-Law-Lab/fca_bulk_data
Current Coverage: 2001 – 2022 (* cases with neutral citation)
Number of Decisions: ~14,000
Languages: English & French
Format: JSON (yearly files)
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Citation: Sean Rehaag, “Federal Court of Appeal Bulk Decisions Dataset” (2023), online: Refugee Law Laboratory https://refugeelab.ca/bulk-data/fca
Programmatic Access in Python:
import pandas as pd import json import requests # Set variables start_year = 2001 # First year of data sought (2001 +) end_year = 2022 # Last year of data sought (2022 -) language = None # language of cases sought ('en', 'fr', or None for both) # load data base_ulr = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Refugee-Law-Lab/fca_bulk_data/master/DATA/YEARLY/' results = [] for year in range(start_year, end_year+1): url = base_ulr + f'{year}.json' results.extend(requests.get(url).json()) # convert to dataframe df = pd.DataFrame(results) # filter by language if applicable if language: df = df[df['language'] == language] df
