About DocketDrift

DocketDrift is a public-record analysis tool for state appellate courts. We collate published opinions from official sources, normalize them into a structured archive, and make patterns in judicial decisions easier to read together.

Methodology

All source material in DocketDrift comes from public records. Opinions are ingested from official court releases and the open Free Law Project / CourtListener archive. Where structured fields (case number, disposition, author) can be extracted reliably from the published text, they're populated automatically. Where they can't, they're left empty for human review.

Patterns and case-pairs that the system surfaces are tools for human review, never assertions of judicial inconsistency. Two cases citing the same statute with opposite outcomes are usually legitimately different — different facts, different procedural posture, different sub-issues. The "did this judge contradict themselves" question is a question for a human reader; we just make the pairs easier to find.

Data sources

• CourtListener (Free Law Project) — backfill and historical archive. CourtListener lags real-time by roughly 30 days but covers Minnesota appellate opinions back to 1996.
• Direct upload — opinions are uploaded same-day on the Monday/Wednesday release schedules, ahead of CourtListener's ingestion.

Status

In development. Minnesota is the first covered state; the data model is built to expand state-by-state as parsers come online.

Open source

DocketDrift is open source on GitHub at OnionMadder/docketdrift. The parser rules, ingestion logic, and infrastructure are all readable, auditable, and forkable.