About and methodology

What this is

A free, searchable library of Federal Trade Commission decisions from the official Federal Trade Commission Decisions volumes (1915 to present), built as the first section of a broader consumer law library. It is an independent project, not affiliated with the Federal Trade Commission, and offers no legal advice.

Where the text comes from

Scanned volumes published by the FTC (ftc.gov) and, for a few volumes, scans held by other libraries. Pages with no text layer were OCR'd; each volume was then split into individual decisions. The decision text itself is a US government work in the public domain.

How the metadata was made

Respondent, docket, dates, statutes, practice tags and outcomes were extracted with pattern matching on page headers, vision reads of page images, and an AI model, then merged by precedence (manual correction, then vision, then AI and patterns). Values the pipeline could not corroborate were left blank rather than guessed. Flagged records were checked against the page images. Each date and docket on a decision page shows how it was obtained.

Known limits

• OCR errors: digits and names in older scans can be misread. The original PDF sits beside the text on each decision page.
• Dates: the earliest volumes often print no decision date. 200 decisions show 'not printed in the source' or no date.
• Boundaries: a few decisions may be split or merged incorrectly, especially sections of interlocutory orders.
• Topic and outcome tags are machine-extracted and incomplete for some volumes; treat them as navigation aids.
• This is not an official record. Verify any citation against the source volume before relying on it.

Report an error

Every decision page has a 'Report an error' link that pre-fills the decision id and a permalink. Corrections are applied in the next rebuild.

License

Compiled metadata and site content: CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication). Decision texts: US government works, public domain. See Data.