An API, Version 0.1 is now available.

The first draft of an API for vendor and media neutral citations is now available at: http://universalcitation.org/cgi-bin/citation.cgi. Here is how it works:

There are two methods that can be used to get data from the repository:

1. Submitting case metadata to get conforming cases with their citation.
2. Submitting a known vendor neutral citation to get back the stored metadata for that citation.

Either way, it is a case of submitting a list of key/value pairs to the URL. Acceptable keys are as follows:

• citation
• docket (docket number)
• issue_date (to get records for an exact date)
• startdate/enddate (use either or both to query for date ranges)
• caption (Problematic, but it's there.)
• pub_status (publication status: typically 'U' for unpublished, 'P' for published, depending on the court)
• alt_id (submitted by vendor, often the court's filename for the document)
• year
• unicite_no (the vendor/media neutral sequence number for the document)
• submitter (the vendor submitting the initial metadata record)
• jurisdiction (federal, or a state (by two-letter postal code))
• court (which court in the jurisdiction, coded according to AALL Universal Citation Guidelines)

Notes on the keys:

issue_date: Must be in yyy-mm-dd format.

submitter: A list of approved submitters will be forthcoming. All vendors of legal information are invited to join us, and would be welcome as submitters.

court: Generally, see the AALL Universal Citation Guide.

Example of a URL submission to the API:
http://universalcitation.org/cgi-bin/citation.cgi? pub_status=U&issue_date=2012-08-20&jurisdiction=federal&court=US+App+(9th)
This will retrieve all unpublished decisions from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit issed on 2012-08-20.

Results returned will be in plain text, and can be saved as .csv files. The first line will include all field names, and all subsequent lines will be document records, with commas as field delimiters and quotes as text delimiters.