Introducing RAGtime | Lawfare
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Benjamin Wittes
benjaminwittes.lawfaremedia.org
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Only a few readers—other than my parents—seem to have noticed that my column, The Situation, sometime in early April suddenly stopped continuing tomorrow.<br>The reason was not that The Situation itself had been substantially ameliorated. It has kept right on situationing along over the past two months—almost as though it doesn’t need my column.<br>A variety of factors led to the hiatus. I needed a break. Certain Lawfare editing and managerial matters required my sustained focus. Also, I was building this thingy which we are rolling out this week in a limited beta release to Lawfare’s material supporters.<br>I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “But wait! I’m not a Lawfare material supporter? How do I get access to the limited beta release of RAGtime?”<br>Well, first off, shame on you! You should be a material supporter of Lawfare. And the good news for you is that you can become one right here and right now. And as soon as you do so, you will suddenly be eligible for the limited beta release of RAGtime.
There. Doesn’t that feel better?<br>I also know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking, “But hang on! What is RAGtime?”<br>I’m glad you asked, if only in your thoughts.<br>RAGtime is a set of tools I have been developing over the last several months in the course of helping some of my colleagues develop and analyze datasets for use in doing rule-of-law journalism. It all began when Lawfare Associate Editor Katherine Pompilio approached me with the problem of how to identify all of the instances in which the government had violated court orders in immigration habeas cases—by failing to release illegally-detained individuals, refusing to provide information about immigrants’ whereabouts, or declining to return personal property like driver’s licenses. It’s hard to find these instances. Pompilio had identified roughly 180 such cases—significantly more than had been identified in published news stories—but she had run out of obvious leads for identifying them manually. She knew there were more, but how do you find them in courts all over the country?<br>It’s actually a tricky problem. Databases don’t code for violated court orders. They can be expensive to query. The cases do not all cite each other. And the violations of court orders do not generally get noted in published opinions.<br>Pompilio’s problem led me to explore an interesting hypothesis: What if the best way to identify these cases lay in the texts of federal dockets? The theory was that one doesn’t need to read the whole case or its actual orders to figure out which cases are at high risk of containing violated court orders. One need, rather, read only the list of documents filed in the cases, which often contains key language signaling judicial fury at government government conduct.<br>So I downloaded every federal docket in every habeas case since the beginning of the second Trump administration. And I trained Anthropic’s Claude on the dockets Pompilio had identified as containing actual violations of court orders. I then had it read the tens of thousands of other habeas dockets to flag for Pompilio the ones likely to yield fruit. This gave her a dataset of many hundreds of cases, most of which were duds. But more than 200 were not duds. And she emerged with a list of 415 cases in which we could document actual violations of actual court orders.<br>I did what any red-blooded American would do in response: I downloaded the dockets of all federal litigation filed in the United States since Jan. 20, 2025, and I built an AI-enabled search engine on top of it. This was the core of what became RAGtime. Other journalists—some at Lawfare and some elsewhere—began asking me to create datasets to examine specific questions.<br>Could we identify all criminal cases against protesters? Why yes!
What about cases brought under a particular statute? No problem.
Could we produce lists of cases that had a high probability of reflecting politically-motivated abuse of law enforcement? Funny you should ask.
What about civil cases challenging DOGE actions that had substantial administrative records? Done.
The database, it occurred to me, would be more powerful still if I started ingesting large numbers of the underlying documents within the cases: the complaints, the indictments, the opinions, the arguments over dispositive motions.<br>The result was RAGtime’s federal court litigation corpus, which currently contains 1.2 million case dockets, nearly 6.9 million docket entries, and more than 380,000 key documents within those...