FAQ

Scope

What courts does The Well cover?

The initial scope is the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. Coverage will expand to additional federal district courts in California, the Ninth Circuit, and large California state superior courts. See the coverage and roadmap page for the current state.

Will you cover federal courts outside California?

Probably, eventually. The schema is jurisdiction-agnostic. Adding a new district requires a scraper for that court's published materials, an extractor configuration, and contributors who practice there. The project welcomes pull requests that add new jurisdictions.

Why not include state appellate or magistrate judges?

They are in scope, but ordering matters. The first tranche is the bench most heavily used by California-based federal civil litigators. Other roles will follow as scrapers and contributor coverage are added.

Does The Well rate or rank judges?

No. The Well does not publish subjective ratings, ideological labels, or commentary on outcomes. Pages describe procedure and cite sources.

Sourcing

Where does the data come from?

Four source types: court websites and standing orders (parsed with deterministic extractors), PACER-derived statistics (motion-ruling cadence, bench-ruling rate), and aggregated observations from verified California-barred attorneys. Every field on a judge page is tagged with the source type it came from.

Does The Well use AI to summarize judges?

No. Extractors are regex and structural HTML parsing. No language model writes, paraphrases, or summarizes anything in the data pipeline. The decision is deliberate; see the methodology page.

How fresh is the data?

Scrapers run on a weekly schedule. Each standing order and each procedural field carries a last fetched or last verified timestamp. Stale fields are flagged in the review queue for re-scraping.

A judge page is wrong. How do I fix it?

Open an issue with the data:correction label or a pull request against the YAML in data/judges/{jurisdiction}/. Either way, include a citation. Corrections without citations are indistinguishable from rumors and will not be merged.

Contribution and anonymity

Who can contribute observations?

Active California-barred attorneys, after a manual verification against State Bar records. Verification produces a credential; the credential then submits observations through a path designed to prevent linkage between contributor and observation.

How is contributor identity protected?

Architecturally — meaning the system is built so that no operator, including the maintainer, can link a specific observation to a specific contributor. See docs/anonymity.md for the design.

Can a court order or subpoena unmask a contributor?

The architecture is designed so that the data the operator holds does not contain the linkage. The threat model describes what the project defends against and what it does not, and the warrant canary tracks legal process directed at the operator.

Can I contribute without being a barred attorney?

Yes — by adding jurisdictions, improving scrapers and extractors, correcting cards with citations, or filing issues. Observation-style contributions from courtroom appearances are limited to verified attorneys.

Use

Can I cite The Well in a brief?

You can, but verify with primary sources first. Standing orders and local rules are linked from each judge page; cite those. The Well is a navigation layer for those primary sources, not a substitute for them.

Can I redistribute the data?

Yes. The data is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0. Attribute The Well and share derivatives under the same license.

Can I use The Well's code in my own project?

Yes, under AGPL-3.0. If you operate a modified version as a network service, you must publish your modifications under the same license.

Can I scrape this site?

Please clone the repository instead. The data is published as YAML in data/judges/; the schema is stable and versioned. Scraping the rendered HTML adds load to Cloudflare's edge for no benefit.

Project

Who runs The Well?

The Well is operated solely by Zachary Brenner. See the about page for governance and the warrant canary for current operator status.

How is The Well funded?

Voluntary GitHub Sponsors contributions plus the maintainer's own resources. No advertising, no commercial partnerships, no editorial influence from funders.

Is The Well affiliated with any court, bar, or firm?

No. The Well is an independent open-source project. It is not endorsed by, sponsored by, or affiliated with any court, the State Bar of California, or any law firm.