CJP Transparency Project

This project is designed to work collaboratively with law student interns to expand the scope of CJP’s transparency work across the county. CJP’s expansion from focusing just on local Chicago justice agencies to local justice systems around the country was always part of the plan but the events of 2020 push our plans forward. With the help of our interns, we are expanding our use of the open records laws to local justice systems across the county.
Our interns are assisting CJP in:
  • developing standardized requests to each level of the justice system
  • evaluating responses from justice agencies
  • conducting research and drafting memos to assist CJP’s counsel in planning legal response
CJP has already expanded to the city of Washington, DC in the summer of 2020. Our goals are to expand to the top 10 largest cities in the country by the end of summer and the top 20 by the end of 2021. We are also including smaller cities that earn their place on our list through egregious actions of their police departments like Louisville, KY, South Bend, IN, and Columbus, OH.
In the summer of 2021 CJP is partnering with the American Constitutional Society to recruit interns to help support this project. If you are a law student attending any law school in the US or a practicing lawyer who just wants to donate a few hours a week to our transparency efforts please contact us.

Open Justice Project – American Constitutional Society

This project has been ongoing since the summer of 2020 and is a collaboration between CJP and the American Constitutional Society (ACS). The project has law student volunteers analyzing open records laws and any other intersecting statutes in every state in the country to determine what opportunities those laws provide for CJP (and local communities) to use them to open data from justice agencies. The volunteers also seek to determine what if any restrictions those laws place on the accessibility of this data. ACS is now actively recruiting additional law student volunteers to work with CJP this summer to help us complete the 50-state review by September. Once this review is complete, we will be using this data to do the following:
  • CJP will use this data to help strategically plan our efforts in our Transparency Project
  • As the basis for a website that:

    - allows communities and advocate across the county to learn about how to use open records laws to open data about their justice systems

    - compares across states about how their open records laws allow access to justice system data.

If you are a law student attending any law school in the US or a practicing lawyer who just wants to donate a few hours a week to our transparency efforts please contact us.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out to our Nation Leads at [email protected]

If you’d like to begin the application process, complete the steps and sign up on our Get Involved page.