Federal Court of Appeal Bulk Decisions Dataset

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