CA4Fourth Circuit TrackerUpdated
About

About CA4 Tracker

An independent dashboard for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Not affiliated with the court.

What this tracks

Every case scheduled for oral argument before the Fourth Circuit since 2020 — including the panel composition, courtroom, argument audio, and the case’s eventual disposition (affirmance, reversal, remand, dismissal, settlement). En-banc sittings, rehearings, and law-school visits are all captured.

Cases that are removed from a published calendar (rescheduled or withdrawn) are tracked separately on the Removed Cases page so the audit trail isn’t lost.

What this excludes

  • Briefs, motions, and other docket filings — the dashboard is argument-centric, not a full PACER mirror.
  • Per-judge financial disclosures, biographical data, or anything outside the public oral-argument record.
  • Cases decided without oral argument that never appeared on a published calendar.

Data sources

  • Calendar PDFs from ca4.uscourts.gov. Each session’s PDF is parsed for cases, panels, and courtroom assignments.
  • Calendar-change notices (the calchange*.pdf series) are ingested for documented removals and reschedulings.
  • Oral-argument audio from the CA4 archive at ca4.uscourts.gov/OAarchive/mp3/.
  • Opinions and dispositions from the CourtListener API, cross-checked against the CA4 opinion PDFs themselves.

Refresh cadence

The site rebuilds whenever the committed JSON snapshot in the repository changes. The “Updated” timestamp in the header reflects the wall-clock time the snapshot was generated.

Snapshot refreshes are triggered manually through therefresh-dataGitHub Action, which scrapes the CA4 calendar feed, probes audio, backfills opinions and dispositions from CourtListener, then commits the regenerated JSON. A successful refresh updates every page on the same build, so all timestamps on the site should match.

Reporting a data error

If you spot a wrong panel, a missing case, a bad disposition, or anything else that looks off, please open an issue at github.com/samhartzell/CA4-Calendar/issues. Include the case docket number and a link to the page you saw the problem on.

Who built this

CA4 Tracker is maintained by Sam Hartzell. The source is open at github.com/samhartzell/CA4-Calendar.