Milestone: CourtListener has 365 Days of Continuous Oral Argument Listening

Michael Lissner

You said you liked listening to oral argument recordings, and we heard you. Back in 2014, we began collecting oral argument recordings, and we're happy to share that as of today we have more than 365 days of continuous oral argument listening -- a full year. You can sit down today, start listening to oral arguments, and 365 days later, you'll have finished listening to what we currently have. (Of course, by then, we'll have thousands more minutes to listen to!)

Lots of people like binge watching TV shows. So, for comparison, this much oral argument audio is similar to watching:

  • Every episode of The Simpsons…40 times
  • Every episode of Law & Order…19 times
  • Every episode of Sesame Street…2 times
  • About half of the episodes of General Hospital!

(Source)

Listening to lawyers argue for this much time is not recommended, but we've seen demand for this material and we're very pleased to offer it as oral argument podcasts or directly on CourtListener.com.

We're also working on and investigating a few new projects to enhance oral argument recordings:

  • Removing dead air at the beginning and ends of oral argument recordings and doing volume normalization if necessary.

  • Petitioning 2nd, 10th, and 11th Circuits to put their oral arguments online for free download. (Here's our letter to the 11th Circuit. Get in touch if you want to help with this effort.)

  • Automatically generating transcripts for the audio files, making it searchable and using it to trigger alerts.

If you're interested in any of these projects, get in touch. We'd love to have your help. If not, enjoy listening to what we've got---it should keep you busy a while!

As always, if you enjoy our oral arguments, please make a donation to support our work.

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