Welcome to the Judge Pics Repository

This is a collection of judicial profile pics or portraits that can be used in any project. Original files can be found in the orig directory and converted versions can be found in the numerical directories.

The goal of this project is to collect and maintain an updated repository of all important judges over the years. There are two types of pictures in this repository. The first are head shots or portraits of judges, and the second are group shots of the entire bench on a specific date.

Contributing

This project is blissfully easy to contribute to and we need lots of help gathering files. You can see untapped sources for images in the additional-sources.md file.

The process for this is pretty simple, but if you need help or just want to email us photos, that works too. Just get in touch via our contact page.

The normal process is:

1. Find an image and ensure it follows our quality guidelines (below).

2. Add the image file to the orig directory.

   Pictures are given the name of the judge and are of in the form:

    $last-$first-$dob.jpeg
   

   Where $dob should be completed to the highest possible granularity. So, for example Antonin Scalia, a well-known judge would be:

    scalia-antonin-1936-03-11.jpeg
   

   Noting that:

   • birth dates should be set using ISO-8601 format and should be provided at the highest possible granularity. I.e., if only the year is known, then only the year should be provided.
   • the name is lowercase.
   • the extension is jpeg, not jpg.
   • any punctuation marks in a judge's name should be elided or converted to a dash, according to Django's slugify function.

   For example:

    oconnor-sandra-1930-03-26.jpeg
   

   Some judges may have multiple great portraits. For those, omit the date of birth and place a number after their name such as:

    sotomayor-sonia-2.jpeg
   

   We have also begun collecting group pictures. For these, the pattern is:

    group-$court-code-$date.jpeg
   

   Noting that:

   • $court corresponds to the Juriscraper/CourtListener code for the court. If you are unsure what code to use, you can easily look it up on CourtListener.
   • The date should be the earliest date that a group of judges is known to work together. In many cases, you'll be unsure and will need to simply use today's date. That's OK. Again, dates should be in ISO-8601 format.
   • Again, the extension is jpeg, not jpg, and certainly not png.

3. Regenerate the converted versions by running convert_images.py (note that this requires imagemagick and exiftool).

4. Edit judges.json to include the relevant fields for your new file such as the date of the portrait, source, artist, and license. (By default, the license field is set to "Work of Federal Government", as these photos are the easiest to procure.)

That's it!

Quality Guidelines

1. Images must be jpeg file format.
2. Pictures of painted portraits are often skewed and often show the wall where the portrait is hung. Before submitting, de-skew the image and crop out any bits of wall that you can see around the edges.
3. Images must be in the public domain or you must dedicate them there, if you took the image yourself. Works of the Federal Government are in the public domain, so generally portraits of Federal judges can be included in this collection.

Installation

Basic usage doesn't require any installation, but if you wish to import the judges.json file into a Python program, you may want to install this as a Python module in your system. To do so:

sudo git clone https://github.com/freelawproject/judge-pics /usr/local/judge_pics
sudo ln -s `pwd`/judge_pics `python -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib()"`/judge_pics

You can then import the judges.json information into your project using:

from judge_pics import judge_pics

A Note to Judges

If you're a judge looking at this, and you want your picture to be included too, you can contribute it yourself using the guidelines in this readme.

Alternatively, if you prefer, you can send us an email using the contact form on the Free Law Project website, and we'll be happy to do it for you.

Either way, we'd be elated to hear from you.

Copyright

Two things. First, if you are creating original work, please consider signing and emailing a contributor license to us so that we may protect the work later, if needed. We do this because we have a lot of experience with IP litigation, and this is a good way to protect a project.

Second, if you're just curious about the copyright of this repository, see the License file for details. The license of individual images is described in judges.json.