CourtListener - US Federal Court Dockets & Opinions

Every US federal court filing in the Free Law Project's CourtListener bulk data, straight from the public-domain source (CC PDM 1.0). 64.9 million federal dockets and 3.45 million decided cases, across 397 federal courts - circuit and district, bankruptcy, and the specialty courts. Search by court, case name, date or suit type; profile a judge's docket; or roll the caseload up by court or year.

Low cost

From $0.00005 per record, down to $0.00003 at Gold. Pay only for the records you actually receive - the whole register stays queryable, you are never billed for the scan behind it.

What you get

Metadata for federal court filings - not full opinion text. Three corpora:

• corpus="dockets" (default) - 64.9M docket rows. Court, case name and short name, docket number (and its PACER case id), filing/termination/last- filing dates, nature of suit, cause, jury demand, jurisdiction type, the assigned and referred judges, the panel, the court appealed from, and the multi-district-litigation status.
• corpus="opinions" - 3.45M decided cases (opinion clusters). Court, case name, decision date, the deciding judges, nature of suit, precedential status and the citation count. Links to its docket by docketId.
• corpus="courts" - the 397-court federal reference: id, short and full name and jurisdiction code.

Every row carries courtId (e.g. nysd, ca9, dcd) plus the court's short and full name, so a court filter and a court label come from the same row.

The courts you can search

397 federal courts, by jurisdiction code:

• 127 appellate (F) - the Supreme Court, the twelve regional circuits (ca1-ca11 plus the D.C. Circuit cadc), and the Federal Circuit cafc.
• 125 district (FD) - every US district court (nysd, cacd, txsd, ).
• 95 bankruptcy (FB), 42 specialty (FS: the Court of Federal Claims, Veterans Claims, the Tax Court, the trade and contract boards), and 8 FBP.

Filter it

• Court - court="nysd" (S.D. New York), "ca9" (Ninth Circuit), "dcd", "txsd". Leave blank to search every federal court.
• Case name - caseName="United States", "Securities".
• Nature of suit - natureOfSuit="Civil Rights", "Contract", "Patent", "Habeas".
• Date - dateFiledFrom="2024-01-01", dateFiledTo="2024-12-31".
• Judge - assignedTo="Liman" (dockets) or judges="BEEZER" (opinions).
• Precedential status - precedentialStatus="Published" (opinions).
• Jury demand - juryDemand="Plaintiff" (dockets).

Example inputs

One district's recent filings - S.D. New York.

{ "court": "nysd", "maxResults": 100 }

A circuit's published decisions - the Ninth Circuit, precedential only.

{ "corpus": "opinions", "court": "ca9", "precedentialStatus": "Published", "maxResults": 100 }

One case by name in a court - a case-name search.

{ "court": "nysd", "caseName": "United States", "maxResults": 50 }

A filing window - everything filed in 2024.

{ "dateFiledFrom": "2024-01-01", "dateFiledTo": "2024-12-31", "maxResults": 200 }

How the caseload breaks down - count per court.

{ "mode": "aggregate", "groupBy": "court" }

Or roll it up

Set mode=aggregate and get a count by court, year, juryDemand, jurisdictionType (dockets) or precedentialStatus (opinions). Every group comes back - this mode is not cut off by maxResults. (Nature of suit is a free-text filter, not a group-by - it has thousands of distinct values.)

An empty run returns the counts by court from a small precomputed record; add any filter and the actor switches to rows automatically.

Then use it

• Litigation research - a court's filings by type, date or judge.
• Docket monitoring - pull a court's or a judge's recent cases and watch them.
• Case-law analytics - opinion volume and precedential mix by court and year.

Example output

One Ninth Circuit docket (dockets corpus):

{
 "platform": "courtlistener-federal",
 "source": "courtlistener-dockets",
 "corpus": "dockets",
 "mode": "rows",
 "groupKey": "",
 "groupCount": "",
 "groupBy": "",
 "docketId": "59910877",
 "opinionClusterId": "",
 "courtId": "ca9",
 "courtName": "Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit",
 "courtShortName": "Ninth Circuit",
 "courtJurisdiction": "F",
 "caseName": "Regency Air, LLC v. Stephen Dickson",
 "caseNameFull": "",
 "caseNameShort": "",
 "docketNumber": "20-72084",
 "docketNumberRaw": "20-72084",
 "pacerCaseId": "324035",
 "dateFiled": "2020-07-16",
 "dateTerminated": "2021-07-01",
 "dateLastFiling": "2021-08-23",
 "dateArgued": "2021-05-14",
 "natureOfSuit": "",
 "cause": "",
 "juryDemand": "",
 "jurisdictionType": "",
 "assignedTo": "",
 "referredTo": "",
 "panel": "",
 "appealFrom": "Federal Aviation Administration",
 "mdlStatus": "",
 "federalDnCaseType": "",
 "federalDnOfficeCode": "",
 "precedentialStatus": "",
 "citationCount": "",
 "judges": "",
 "disposition": "",
 "scdbId": "",
 "blocked": "f",
 "sourceUpdatedAt": "2026-10-08"
}

mode=aggregate, groupBy=court - one count row per court:

cacb                                          2,027,614
ilnb                                          1,626,612
txsd                                          1,506,357
azd                                           1,463,519
flmb                                          1,427,253
jpml                                          1,337,145
...

Notes on the data, from the source

• This is federal courts only. The upstream bulk files also carry state appellate courts; those are filtered out at warm time using the courts taxonomy, so every row here is a US federal filing.
• Metadata, not full text. The opinion clauses carry the case's descriptors (judges, nature of suit, precedential status, citation count) - not the opinion body. That is deliberately the stable, citeable layer.
• S.E.C. and PACER notes. docketNumber is the court's own number; when a docket has been pulled from PACER, pacerCaseId carries PACER's id.
• dateFiled is the filing date, not the decision date; for an opinion use the opinions corpus, whose dateFiled is the decision date.
• Court ids are CourtListener's (nysd, ca9, dcd) - the same ids the courts corpus lists, so a court filter can be driven from that lookup.
• The data is public domain (CC PDM 1.0) via the Free Law Project / CourtListener.
• sourceUpdatedAt is the warm build date; the register is rebuilt from the monthly bulk export.