Sources & Methods

Every document on this site is a real, published Illinois government record, and the original is always one click away from the page you're reading. What sits on top of those records — the plain-language summaries, holdings and categories that make them searchable — is partly written by hand and partly machine-generated. This page says which is which, where the documents came from, and what's still known to be imperfect. The source document always wins.

1. What the documents are

The corpus behind this site has 821 Illinois FOIA/OMA documents from the Attorney General's Public Access Counselor (PAC), plus 287 Illinois appellate and Supreme Court cases that address FOIA or the Open Meetings Act. These are not all the same kind of document, and they don't carry the same legal weight:

Public Access Opinions: 233 documents. These are the Attorney General's formal, numbered opinions resolving a Request for Review. They are binding — under 5 ILCS 140/9.5, a Public Access Opinion is enforceable and the public body involved must comply with it (subject to court review). Marked binding in the underlying data.
PAC determination letters: 580 documents. These are shorter letters closing out an individual Request for Review without issuing a formal Opinion. They explain how PAC staff read the statute on that requester's specific facts, but they are not binding on anyone beyond that one dispute — persuasive, not precedential.
Other Attorney General opinions: 8 older, non-PAC Attorney General opinions that address OMA topics, included for historical completeness.
Court cases: 287 Illinois appellate and Supreme Court opinions that actually decide, or meaningfully discuss, a FOIA or Open Meetings Act question. Court decisions are judicial rulings, not administrative opinions — where one is directly on point, it carries more legal weight than either PAC document type above.

In short: 233 of the 821 PAC-side documents are binding Public Access Opinions; the other 588 are non-binding determination letters and older opinions. A binding Opinion and a non-binding letter that reach different conclusions on similar facts are not necessarily in conflict — seePAC vs. Precedent for the separate, narrower question of where a binding Opinion's reading ran contrary to appellate case law that already existed when it was written.

2. Where they came from

The PAC opinions and determination letters were scraped from the Illinois Attorney General's public PAC pages. The court cases were scraped from the Illinois Courts website (and, for a small number of pre-1996 cases, supplemented from the Caselaw Access Project). Nothing here was typed in by hand from a secondary source — every document traces back to one of those two original publishers.

3. How the summaries were written and checked

The source PDF — or, for court cases, the extracted case text — is always the authoritative version of the document. Every summary on this site is a convenience for finding and skimming documents faster, not a replacement for reading the actual document, and not a substitute for legal advice.

Summaries were produced two different ways, and it's worth knowing which one you're reading:

Written by hand: 267 documents — the binding Public Access Opinions and the older Attorney General opinions — had their plain-language summaries rewritten by hand, each one drafted from that opinion's own source text rather than generated. These are the documents that carry the most legal weight, so they got the most attention.
Machine-generated, then checked: The rest — overwhelmingly PAC determination letters — were generated by a language model reading that document's own extracted source text, never outside commentary about the case. Each was then run back through a second, separate pass that checked the summary against that same source text for accuracy, with the recorded holding cross-checked at the same time. Where that check found a problem, a correction was drafted and independently re-verified against the source before being accepted; nothing was overwritten with a fix that hadn't itself passed the same check.
Least verified: The legal question and subject category fields were machine-generated the same way but were not independently re-checked. Treat them as the least reliable fields on the site.

As of this build, 0 documents remain flagged as unresolved after repeated correction attempts. Each carries a visible caveat banner on its own page pointing back to the source PDF as authoritative — if you land on a document with that banner, treat the summary text there as unverified and read the original. Mistakes that survived all of this are still possible, which is what thecorrections form is for.

4. Known limitations

OCR quality varies. Older scanned documents sometimes produce noisier extracted text than born-digital ones; a handful of pages carry a low-OCR-confidence caveat for exactly this reason.
Not every document has a recorded issue date. Some older records don't.
Requester mailing addresses were redacted from document text before publication. Requester names were not.
This is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for reading the source document or consulting a lawyer. Every page on this site carries some version of this disclaimer for a reason — the summaries are a research aid, not a legal opinion about your situation.

5. Data license

The data on this site — opinions, letters, cases, and all associated metadata — is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 (No Rights Reserved). The underlying source documents are government records published by the Illinois Attorney General's office; no copyright is claimed in the compilation, metadata, or machine-generated summaries either. Use the data however you like — no attribution required.

The full dataset is available for download on the bulk data page.

6. Corrections

If you find a document on this site whose summary, holding, or category doesn't match what the source document actually says, that's useful to know about. The checking described above caught a real and documented number of errors, and there's no reason to assume it caught every one.

Use the form below to report an error. Include the document number or URL and a brief description of what's wrong. The source PDF is always linked on each document page — please check it before submitting.