Update README.md

README.md

@@ -8,25 +8,45 @@ tags:
 - legal
 - court
 - opinions
-viewer: false
+size_categories:
+- 1M<n<10M
 ---
 
 <a href="https://huggingface.co/datasets/harvard-lil/cold-cases/resolve/main/coldcases.png"><img src="https://huggingface.co/datasets/harvard-lil/cold-cases/resolve/main/coldcases-banner.webp"/></a>
 
 # Collaborative Open Legal Data (COLD) - Cases
 
-Re-packaged bulk data from [courtlistener.com](https://www.courtlistener.com/help/api/bulk-data), allowing for easy batch processing of open legal data, for example in the context of data science / AI experiments. 
+COLD Cases is a dataset of 8.3 million United States legal decisions with text and metadata, formatted as one JSON object per decision.
+The total dataset size is approximately 104GB of uncompressed JSON.
+
+This dataset exists to support the open legal movement exemplified by projects like
+[Pile of Law](https://huggingface.co/datasets/pile-of-law/pile-of-law) and 
+[LegalBench](https://hazyresearch.stanford.edu/legalbench/).
+A key input to legal understanding projects is caselaw -- the published, precedential decisions of judges deciding legal disputes and explaining their reasoning.
+United States caselaw is collected and published as open data by [CourtListener](https://www.courtlistener.com/), which maintains scrapers to aggregate data from
+a wide range of public sources.
+
+COLD Cases reformats CourtListener's [bulk data](https://www.courtlistener.com/help/api/bulk-data) so that all of the semantic information about each legal decision
+(the authors and text of majority and dissenting opinions; head matter; and substantive metadata) is encoded in a single JSON object per decision, with extraneous
+data removed. By consolidating the data engineering for preprocessing caselaw in an
+[open source](https://github.com/harvard-lil/cold-cases-export)
+pipeline maintained by the Harvard Law School Library, we ensure
+that downstream machine learning and natural language processing projects can use consistent, high quality representations of cases for legal understanding tasks.
 
 Prepared by the [Harvard Library Innovation Lab](https://lil.law.harvard.edu) in collaboration with the [Free Law Project](https://free.law/).
 
 ---
 
-## Summary
+
+## Links
+- [Data nutrition label](https://datanutrition.org/labels/v3/?id=c29976b2-858c-4f4e-b7d0-c8ef12ce7dbe) (DRAFT). ([Archive](https://perma.cc/YV5P-B8JL)).
+- [Pipeline source code](https://github.com/harvard-lil/cold-cases-export)
+
+  ## Table of Contents
 - [Formats](#formats)
 - [File structure](#file-structure)
 - [Data dictionary](#data-dictionary)
-- [Data nutrition label](https://datanutrition.org/labels/v3/?id=c29976b2-858c-4f4e-b7d0-c8ef12ce7dbe) (DRAFT). ([Archive](https://perma.cc/YV5P-B8JL)).
-- [Pipeline source code](https://github.com/harvard-lil/cold-cases-export)
+- [Notes on appropriate use](#appropriate-use)
 
 ---
 
@@ -102,9 +122,18 @@ Partial glossary of the fields in the data.
 
 [☝️ Go back to Summary](#summary)
 
-## Exploring this data
+## Notes on appropriate use
+
+When using this data, please keep in mind:
 
-We have disabled the dataset viewer in this repo to avoid harmful personal information being indexed on the open web. If you'd like to explore the data, 
-instructions for loading this data in [Elasticsearch](https://www.elastic.co/elasticsearch/) and exploring it in [Kibana](https://www.elastic.co/kibana/) are available in the 
-[Github Repo](https://github.com/harvard-lil/cold-cases-export).
+* All documents in this dataset are public information, published by courts within the United States to inform the public about the law. **You have a right to access them.**
+* Nevertheless, **public court decisions frequently contain statements about individuals that are not true**. Court decisions often contain claims that are disputed,
+ or false claims taken as true based on a legal technicality, or claims taken as true but later found to be false. Legal decisions are designed to inform you about the law -- they are not
+ designed to inform you about individuals, and should not be used in place of credit databases, criminal records databases, news articles, or other sources intended
+ to provide factual personal information. Applications should carefully consider whether use of this data will inform about the law, or mislead about individuals.
+* **Court decisions are not up-to-date statements of law**. Each decision provides a given judge's best understanding of the law as applied to the stated facts
+ at the time of the decision. Use of this data to generate statements about the law requires integration of a large amount of context --
+ the skill typically provided by lawyers -- rather than simple data retrieval.
 
+To mitigate privacy risks, we have filtered out cases [blocked or deindexed by CourtListener](https://www.courtlistener.com/terms/#removal). Researchers who
+require access to the full dataset without that filter may rerun our pipeline on CourtListener's raw data.