Judge research desk: profiles, rulings, and prep briefs

Build me a judge research desk I can open before any hearing. This is an ad hoc research surface I browse on demand, not a scheduled memo and not an alert. I type a judge's name, get a single profile screen for that judge, and can compare judges or export a brief from there.

The main screen is a search box. When I type a judge's name, look them up with CourtListener's List People (Judges) and show the matching judges so I can pick the right one. Selecting a judge opens their profile screen with their full name, biography, date and place of birth, education including schools and degrees, and political affiliation, all from that person record.

Below the biography, show the full appointment history as a timeline using List Judge Positions for the selected judge. Each entry shows the court, the position title, how they were selected or appointed, the appointment date, the confirmation date, and the start and end dates, sorted newest first.

Under the timeline, show a scrollable list of the cases the judge decided or sat on the panel for. Use List Opinion Clusters filtered to that judge for the case level records, and List Opinions where you need the individual decision documents behind a cluster. Each row shows the case name, the court, the date filed, and the citation when there is one. Add a court picker built from List Courts so I can narrow the list to a specific district or circuit, and let me sort by most recent.

Clicking any case opens the full opinion text in a reading pane using Get Opinion. At the top of that pane, generate a short plain language summary of the decision, a few sentences covering what the dispute was about and how it came out, sitting above the full text. Keep the full text scrollable and comfortable to read, and label the summary clearly as generated.

A compare view lets me put two or three judges side by side in columns. Each column shows the same fields: background and education, political affiliation, current court and title, years on the bench, and recent case volume such as how many decisions they issued in the last year or two. The point is to see how their backgrounds and recent activity differ before I decide where to file.

Every judge profile has a Build prep brief button. It creates a Google Doc with Create Document titled after the judge, then fills it in with Batch Update Document. The brief contains the biography and education, the appointment timeline, and a summary of that judge's most relevant recent decisions. Use headings and readable formatting rather than one wall of text, and show me a link to the finished document when it is ready.

Keep a per user list of recently viewed judges so each person using the app sees their own recents. Show it on the search screen so I can jump straight back to the judges I appear in front of often. Store just enough to render each row, such as the judge name, their court, and the record id.

Important build constraint: CourtListener enforces 5 requests per minute, 50 per hour, and 125 per day per token. Do not prefetch judge lists or bulk load data when the app opens. Fetch on demand only for the judge I actually select, cache the loaded profile in app state so revisiting a judge or switching tabs does not refetch, and reuse those cached profiles in the compare view. If a request returns a 429, read the Retry-After header and show me a clear message saying how long to wait, rather than failing silently or retrying in a loop.

Judge biographies and opinion bodies are very large. Use the fields and omit parameters to trim payloads on every list view, requesting only the columns the list actually renders, and only pull the full opinion text when I open a specific case in the reading pane.