Virginia Verdicts is a project focused on collecting and providing access to materials by and about the Supreme Court of Virginia (SCV). Our goal is to include links to every SCV case ever decided, whenever we can point users to permanent, free-to-access content. Most of these links and source materials come from CourtListener, which draws on both the Harvard Caselaw Access Project and its own collections.
To prepare the project, we hired a programmer to extract and organize data using the CourtListener API. This person created a dataset for import, resulting in 21,881 entries. We are reviewing that dataset and considering the best publication approach: either editing and checking entries before release, or making the full dataset available sooner with a label indicating that an entry is part of an unreviewed bulk import.
For the initial launch, we are reviewing all entries we publish, with a goal of improving record accuracy. In a sense, we’re going for quality over quantity.
