Michael Jay Lissner
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About me

My name is Mike Lissner. I am the Executive Director and CTO of Free Law Project where I spend most of my time making CourtListener, RECAP, and Juriscraper.

I'm a big believer in technology's ability to make us happier, and believe that the legal system is an area that's ripe for innovation.

I'm a grad from UC Berkeley's School of Information and Pitzer College. Between the two, I'm something of a liberal-minded techno-person with a dash of old-school hippy.

My Projects

  • CourtListener A powerful search and awareness tool leveling the legal field
  • Juriscraper A tool to scrape judgements from hundreds of court websites.
  • Judge Pics A collection of judicial pictures and portraits.
  • Trim My Feeds A simple tool to strip dead RSS feeds from whatever reader you use.
  • XPath Tester Test XPath queries against text using lxml
  • Swimlane Diagram Generator A pedagogical exercise to take XML, convert it to Javascript and process that back into an SVG swimlane diagram!
  • Pacific Crest Trail Temperature Visualization A research and visualization project of 20,000 temperature recordings along the PCT.

Recent Posts all posts

Updating Bulk Data in CourtListener…Again Can You Do it Faster?
posted in Tech
Thu 06 November 2014
Some Thoughts on Celery A love-hate relationship
posted in Tech
Sat 01 November 2014
Creating a Non-Profit An incantation to make California and the IRS grant your organization tax exempt status
posted in Policy, Law & Politics
Tue 14 October 2014
In Re NSL Under Seal v. Holder
posted in Policy, Law & Politics
Wed 08 October 2014
Editing a File on Github A Non-Technical Explainer
posted in Tech
Mon 06 October 2014
Updating Bulk Data in CourtListener Bulk Data Can Be Hard
posted in Tech
Sun 28 September 2014
New Version of the Site is Now Live Better, Faster, Stronger
posted in Tech
Wed 27 August 2014
Reworking the CourtListener Datamodel Work, iterate, work, iterate…
posted in Tech
Wed 18 June 2014
Our New Zealand Blog
posted in Backpacking
Wed 27 November 2013
Snow Mountain Distance Map
posted in Backpacking
Tue 27 August 2013
Best Energy Pack for Ultra-light, Long-Distance Backpacking Spoiler: It's the Just Mobile Gum++
posted in Backpacking
Fri 19 July 2013
New Tool to Remove Dead Feeds from OPML Files
posted in Tech
Fri 28 June 2013
Desolation Wilderness
posted in Backpacking
Mon 17 June 2013
How to help end Boy Scouts of America’s ban on gays
posted in Policy, Law & Politics
Fri 19 April 2013
So you wanna buy a bike
posted in misc
Tue 05 February 2013
Enabling Two-Factor Authentication
posted in Privacy & Security
Sat 02 February 2013
2013 Donations
posted in Personal
Fri 04 January 2013
Year in Review: Travel Edition
posted in Personal
Mon 31 December 2012
Setting up etherpad with postgres on Windows
posted in Tech
Thu 27 December 2012
Presentation on Juriscraper and CourtListener for LVI2012
posted in Personal
Tue 09 October 2012
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