Court Case Scraper — US Court Opinions, Dockets & Judges

Scrape US federal and state court records — opinions, dockets, oral arguments and judge profiles — from CourtListener's public database of over 10 million legal documents maintained by the Free Law Project.

Search by keyword, court, judge or date filed, then export case names, docket numbers, citations, citation counts and opinion snippets to JSON, CSV or Excel.

No API key required. A free CourtListener token is optional and raises your rate limit.

What you get

Field	Description
caseName	Full case name, e.g. Roe v. Wade
court	Court that issued the decision
courtId	CourtListener court code, e.g. scotus, ca9, cand
docketNumber	Official docket number
dateFiled	Filing / decision date
judge	Judge or panel
attorney	Attorneys of record, when published
citation	Reporter citations, e.g. 410 U.S. 113
citeCount	How many later cases cite this one — a direct precedent-weight signal
status	Precedential status (Published, Unpublished, Errata…)
snippet	Text excerpt with your search terms in context
suitNature	Nature of suit
absoluteUrl	Link to the full record on CourtListener

Example input

{
  "query": "qualified immunity",
  "searchType": "o",
  "court": "ca9",
  "filedAfter": "2023-01-01",
  "minCitations": 1,
  "maxResults": 100
}

Leave query empty and set only a court and date range to pull everything a court filed in a window.

Search types

Value	Searches
o	Case-law opinions (default)
r	Dockets and filings (RECAP)
rd	Individual PACER documents
oa	Oral-argument audio
p	Judges

Example output

{
  "caseName": "In Re '318 Patent Infringement Litigation",
  "court": "District Court, D. Delaware",
  "courtId": "ded",
  "docketNumber": "1:03-cv-00120",
  "dateFiled": "2008-09-26",
  "citeCount": 1,
  "status": "Published",
  "snippet": "...the claimed method of treatment...",
  "absoluteUrl": "https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/..."
}

Who uses this

• Law firms — precedent research, tracking how a doctrine develops in one circuit
• Litigation analytics — judge tendencies, case volume by court and nature of suit
• Legal-tech products — seeding a case-law corpus without scraping PACER
• Journalists and researchers — following a docket or a line of cases over time
• Compliance teams — monitoring new filings that name an industry or statute

Rate limits and the optional token

The actor works with no credentials. CourtListener rate-limits anonymous traffic, so for large pulls create a free account at courtlistener.com, copy your API token and paste it into the API token field — the actor then sends it and you get a much higher quota.

Pricing

Pay per result. You are charged for the records you actually receive, so a search that returns nothing costs nothing beyond the run start.

Notes

• Data comes from CourtListener / the Free Law Project, which publishes US court records that are in the public domain.
• citeCount reflects citations inside CourtListener's corpus, which is the best available open proxy for precedent weight but is not identical to a commercial citator's count.
• Fields such as judge, attorney and citation are only as complete as the court's own published record — expect gaps on older or unpublished decisions.
• This is an unofficial actor and is not affiliated with CourtListener or the Free Law Project.