CourtListener and the Free Law Project
A comprehensive open platform providing US case law, oral arguments, PACER data, and judicial biographies.
The CourtListener platform is the flagship project of the Free Law Project, a nonprofit dedicated to making the American legal system more accessible. It hosts over 10 million judicial opinions from US federal and state courts, downloadable in bulk or accessible via a REST API. The platform also aggregates oral argument recordings, PACER data via RECAP, and judge biographies. All data is available under a CC0 public domain dedication.
API and Data Access
CourtListener provides a powerful REST API for searching opinions, oral arguments, judges, and financial disclosures. Bulk data dumps are available for offline analysis. The RECAP archive contains millions of PACER documents contributed by users through browser extensions. The API supports complex boolean queries, citation lookups, and filtering by court, date, and jurisdiction. Rate limits apply but registered users receive higher limits. See the API documentation for detailed usage.
Key Collections
- Opinions — Federal appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts, plus state appellate courts from 1658 to present
- Oral Arguments — Over 40,000 audio files from federal appellate courts and the Supreme Court
- Judges — Thousands of federal and state judge profiles with biographical data
- Financial Disclosures — Federal judges’ financial reports
- RECAP Archive — Over 1 billion PACER docket entries and documents