⚖️ CourtListener Legal Data Scraper

Search 10 million U.S. court records — federal & state case law, RECAP dockets, oral arguments, and judges — in one click. No PACER fees. No accounts. No captchas.

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🚀 What you get

• 🏛️ Case law — every published opinion from SCOTUS, the U.S. Courts of Appeals, every federal district court, and most state courts of last resort.
• 📁 RECAP dockets — federal court filings sourced directly from PACER, free.
• 📝 Filings — individual docket entries, attachments, and document metadata.
• 🎙️ Oral arguments — argument-audio metadata and download URLs.
• 👨‍⚖️ Judges — biographies, ABA ratings, education, political affiliations, positions held.
• ⚡ Fast — typically 100 records in under 30 seconds.
• 📊 Clean output — flat, normalised, deduplicated, with stable field names. Export to JSON, CSV, or Excel in one click.

This actor wraps the official CourtListener REST API — operated by Free Law Project, a 501(c)(3) non-profit. Data is public domain by virtue of being U.S. court records. ✅

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🤖 Quick start

1. Click Try for free at the top of this page.
2. Pick a search type (opinions, dockets, oral arguments, or judges).
3. Type a search query (or leave blank to browse), pick courts and dates.
4. Click Start — your dataset will be ready as JSON, CSV, or Excel in under a minute. 📦

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⚙️ Input

Field	Description
searchType	opinions (case law), recap (federal dockets), recap_documents (filings), oral_arguments (audio), or people (judges).
query	Free-text search. Supports phrases, AND/OR/NOT, and field prefixes like caseName:"Roe v. Wade".
courtIds	Restrict to specific courts (e.g. scotus, ca9, nyed). Leave blank for all.
dateFiledAfter / dateFiledBefore	Date range (YYYY-MM-DD).
orderBy	score desc (relevance), dateFiled desc/asc, citeCount desc, etc.
maxItems	Stop after N records. 0 = no limit.
since	Incremental mode — skip records older than this date. Combine with a scheduled run to keep a dataset fresh.
apiToken	Optional — paste your CourtListener API token for higher throughput.

💡 Tip: runs without a token use anonymous access (5 requests/min). For larger jobs, grab a free token — it takes 30 seconds and gives you your own private rate-limit pool. A CourtListener Membership unlocks high-throughput access.

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📤 Sample output

{
  "id": "cluster-10307218",
  "type": "opinion",
  "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/10307218/miranda-v-kennedy/",
  "case_name": "Miranda v. Kennedy",
  "court": "Court of Appeals for the First Circuit",
  "court_id": "ca1",
  "court_citation_string": "1st Cir.",
  "date_filed": "2025-01-03",
  "date_argued": "2023-02-06",
  "docket_number": "22-1652",
  "docket_id": 66790134,
  "cluster_id": 10307218,
  "citations": ["125 F.4th 23"],
  "cite_count": 2,
  "status": "Published",
  "snippet": "United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit ...",
  "scraped_at": "2026-05-10T17:23:00+00:00"
}

Other record types (docket, recap_document, oral_argument, person) have their own field set — see the Dataset → Overview view in the Apify Console for the full schema.

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💼 Who uses this?

You are...	You use this for...
🏛️ A lawyer / paralegal	Building cite-checked memos, finding precedent in your jurisdiction, monitoring opposing counsel.
📊 A legal analytics team	Bulk-pulling opinions for ML pipelines (citation graphs, judge-prediction models, NLP corpora).
📰 A legal journalist / researcher	Tracking high-profile dockets, finding all opinions citing a landmark case, mapping a judge's record.
💼 A PropTech / FinTech / RegTech firm	Monitoring bankruptcy filings, regulatory enforcement, class-action discovery.
🎓 An academic researcher	Building the next CAP, AustLII, or empirical-legal-studies dataset without scraping headaches.

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🎯 Use-case recipes

📚 All SCOTUS opinions citing Miranda v. Arizona (1966):

searchType = opinions
query      = "miranda v arizona"
courtIds   = scotus
orderBy    = dateFiled desc

📂 Every climate-related federal docket filed since 2020:

searchType    = recap
query         = climate change
dateFiledAfter = 2020-01-01
orderBy       = dateFiled desc

🎙️ Recent Ninth Circuit oral arguments:

searchType = oral_arguments
courtIds   = ca9
orderBy    = dateArgued desc
maxItems   = 200

👨‍⚖️ All federal judges with ABA "Well Qualified" rating:

searchType = people
query      = "Well Qualified"

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💰 Pricing

$4 per 1,000 records (pay only for what you keep — failed and deduplicated records are free). The Apify Free plan includes $5/month in platform credits, enough for ~1,200 records per month before any out-of-pocket spend.

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🛟 FAQ

Do I need a CourtListener account? No — the actor works anonymously for small runs. For high-volume jobs, get a free token (30 seconds, no credit card) at courtlistener.com/profile/api-token/.

Why is my run slow? The default rate limit (anonymous and default-token) is 5 requests/minute. Each request returns up to 100 records. A CourtListener Membership supports the project and unlocks higher rate limits.

Can I use this commercially? Yes — U.S. court records are public domain. CourtListener asks for attribution where reasonable; please credit Free Law Project.

Does this scrape PACER directly? No — RECAP data comes from CourtListener's open PACER mirror, populated by the RECAP browser extension and archive donations. No PACER fees, no PACER login.

How fresh is the data? Opinions land in CourtListener within hours of publication; RECAP filings are added as users contribute them. Use the since input for incremental updates.

My export is missing some fields. Different searchTypes expose different fields (e.g. cite_count is opinion-only). Switch to the Overview dataset view for type-aware columns, or download JSON for the full schema.

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❤️ Credits

Data: CourtListener · A project of Free Law Project, a 501(c)(3) non-profit advancing open access to legal information. If you use this actor for a paid product, consider donating — it's how the data stays free. 🙏