US Court Records Scraper: Case Law & Dockets

Search US federal and state courts for opinions, dockets, judges and oral arguments, as structured rows.

{ "queries": ["copyright fair use"], "resultType": "o", "orderBy": "citeCount desc" }

Free. No key. PACER, the official system, charges per page.

Four indexes

resultType
o	Case law opinions: the published decisions
r	PACER dockets and filings: federal case activity
p	Judges: the judiciary database
oa	Oral argument recordings

The nesting that trips other Actors

A CourtListener v4 search result is a cluster: one case, and the actual opinions hang off it in a nested opinions array. Read only the top level and you get case names with no citation, no opinion type and no text, which is exactly what the existing Actors in this niche return.

Here the cluster and its first opinion are flattened into one row, so citations, opinionType, opinionCount and snippet are all present.

Filters that make it usable

{
  "queries": ["trade secret misappropriation"],
  "court": "ca9",
  "filedAfter": "2023-01-01",
  "orderBy": "citeCount desc"
}

• court takes CourtListener ids: scotus, ca9, cand, nysd
• filedAfter / filedBefore bound the date range
• orderBy supports most cited, which is how you find the controlling authority rather than the most recent noise

Every row also carries totalMatches, so you know how much you are seeing out of how much exists.

Use cases

• Legal research: precedent by topic, ranked by how often it is cited
• Litigation monitoring: new filings naming a company or a patent
• Compliance and risk: has this counterparty been sued, and for what
• Journalism: track a case across dockets and opinions
• Academic: citation networks and judicial output

Pricing

Charged per record returned. A query that matches nothing, or one CourtListener rejects, produces an error row and costs $0.00.

Notes

• Not legal advice. This returns public records. Verify anything you rely on against the official source.
• Coverage is what the Free Law Project has digitised. It is very deep for federal appellate and Supreme Court material, thinner for some state trial courts.
• snippet is the search excerpt CourtListener returns, not the full opinion text. Full text is available at the url on each row.

FAQ

Is it legal to scrape US court records?

These are public records. Court opinions and dockets are published by the courts themselves, and this Actor reads them through the Free Law Project's CourtListener API rather than by scraping court websites.

Do I need a PACER account or a CourtListener API key?

No. PACER charges per page for federal docket access; the material here is the Free Law Project's mirror and index of it, and no key is required.

Can I get the full text of an opinion?

Not in the row itself. snippet is CourtListener's search excerpt. Every row carries a url to the full opinion, which is the right place to read it. Full opinions run to tens of thousands of words and returning them per row would be neither useful nor cheap.

How do I find the leading case on a topic rather than the newest one?

Set orderBy to citeCount desc. Recency is the wrong sort for legal research: the case that matters is usually the one everyone else cites.

Which courts can I filter to?

court takes CourtListener court ids: scotus for the Supreme Court, ca1 through ca11 and cadc for the federal circuits, and district ids like cand or nysd. Coverage is deepest for federal appellate and Supreme Court material and thinner for some state trial courts.

Can I monitor for new filings about a company?

Yes. Run it on a schedule with resultType: "r" for dockets, your company name as the query, and filedAfter set to the last run date.