Happy new year! I hope you had some wonderful, relaxing time off for the holidays and are getting ready to hit the ground running in 2019.
As many legal researchers know, researching court dockets to find criminal complaints and other filings can be frustrating and time-consuming. While the subscription database BloombergLaw (https://www.bloomberglaw.com/) and its comprehensive docket database (including dockets for many state courts) has made docket research much easier than it used to be, it is always helpful to find a resource where this work has been done on the topic you are interested in already. After all, there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
I recently found a great example of this. The George Washington University Program on Extremism (https://extremism.gwu.edu) has created an online database of “criminal complaints, indictments, affidavits, and courtroom transcripts detailing Islamic State-related legal proceedings.” The database is available at https://extremism.gwu.edu/cases.
This is a very helpful resource for researching U.S. judicial proceedings in which criminal charges have been filed against suspected terrorists. This database is organized alphabetically by defendant name, and, as of this writing, it includes entries for 168 cases. Access to the database and its materials is freely available online. The browsing interface is very clean and straightforward, and the PDFs of the scanned documents are of good quality and highly legible.
Looking for more information in general about researching court filings? Check out our Records, Briefs, and Court Filings Research Guide at https://guides.library.harvard.edu/recordsandbriefs.
Also, the Yale Law Library has an excellent Docket Research Guide at https://library.law.yale.edu/guides/docket-research.