IR-Court-Tracker

Owner: Logan Finney — journalist, producer/reporter, Idaho Reports / Idaho Public Television Repository: github.com/loganfinney27/IR-Court-Tracker Organization destination: LAF-US/LAF-PUBLIC (flat merge)

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Overview

IR-Court-Tracker is an automated Python scraper that monitors Idaho-related federal court cases via CourtListener. It tracks case dockets, capturing the original filing date and the most recent docket entry for each case, then writes the results to output.csv for use in reporting.

A GitHub Actions workflow runs the scraper daily and commits updated output files back to the repository.

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How It Works

1. case_urls.csv — Input file listing cases to track (topic, CourtListener docket URL, tag/detail).
2. main.py — Entry point. Loads cases, parses each docket page, writes results.
3. scraper/ — Module containing:
   • urls.py — Loads case_urls.csv
   • fetch.py — HTTP fetching with retry logic, 202-cooldown caching, and jitter delays
   • parser.py — Parses CourtListener docket pages (case title, court, first/latest entry dates and links)
   • pipeline.py — Merges new scraped rows with existing output.csv, preserving prior data when new values are unavailable
   • failures.py — Logs failed URLs to failed_urls.csv
   • commit.py — Commits and pushes updated output files via GitPython
4. output.csv — Output file with HTML-linked case data for embedding in reporting tools.
5. failed_urls.csv — Log of URLs that could not be fetched.

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Running Locally

pip install -r requirements.txt
python main.py

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LAF-US Organization

This repository is part of Logan Finney's project ecosystem and is slated for migration into the LAF-US GitHub Organization as LAF-US/LAF-PUBLIC. All files will be merged flat into the root of LAF-PUBLIC — no internal subdirectories.

Governance for the broader swarm is maintained in the IDAHO-VAULT. See AGENTS.md in this repository for agent orientation.