Free Law Project Creates the First Online Database of Federal Judicial Financial Disclosures

[Nevilledog]

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Free Law Project ⚖
@FreeLawProject
Four years in the making, today we are announcing a new one-of-a-kind database containing the investment and conflict information for every federal judge. Spanning 17 years, this database was extracted from over 250,000 pages of judicial financial records.

Free Law Project Creates the First Online Database of Federal Judicial Financial Disclosures
We are announcing a huge new database of federal financial disclosures. The first of its kind since the disclosures were mandated more than 40 years ago.
free.law
6:49 AM · Sep 28, 2021

https://free.law/2021/09/28/announcing-federal-financial-disclosures

What is the financial disclosure database?

Our financial disclosure database is a collection of over 250,000 pages of financial records drawn from over 26,000 tiff and PDF files. We requested these files from the federal judiciary beginning in 2017 and have been gathering them since that time.

These files contain the disclosure records for every federal judge, justice, and magistrate from 2011 to 2018. We expect to receive and process the majority of the 2019 disclosures in the coming weeks.

We were also able to gather files from other online sources, providing us with some disclosures from 2003 to 2010. With these in our database, we believe we have every publicly-available financial disclosure form, but that there may be significant private collections in newsrooms and elsewhere. If you have such a collection that you would be willing to share, please let us know.

You can learn more about our sourcing and data coverage on our page dedicated to this topic.

After processing these disclosure files, we were able to extract roughly 1.5 million investment transactions, 14,000 reimbursements, and 1,600 gifts. Additionally, we have gathered data on agreements, debts, and non-investment incomes of the judges and their spouses. To learn more about the definition of these terms, see the relevant section of the Guide to Judicial Policy.

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