🏛️ Google Scholar Case Law API

API for US case law on Google Scholar. Search opinions and pull full case details (parties, court, decision dates, full citations, cited cases) as structured JSON. Filter by court, by decision year, by language. MCP-ready so Claude and other AI agents can call it as a tool.

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📋 What this API returns

Field	Where	Description
result_id	search results	Google Scholar identifier. Use to fetch full case detail.
title	both	Case title with reporter citation.
snippet	search results	Short text preview from the opinion.
publication_info	search results	Author, source, and date block.
inline_links	search results	Cited-by, related, versions, cached links.
name	case detail	Short party-name designation (e.g. Brown v. Board of Education).
court_name	case detail	Deciding court.
dates	case detail	Decision, argued, and filed dates with type labels.
short_citations	case detail	Abbreviated case references.
case_numbers	case detail	Docket numbers.
cited_cases	case detail	Every case referenced in the opinion.
first_page, last_page	case detail	Reporter page range.

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🔍 Use cases

• Legal research API. Pull every Supreme Court opinion mentioning a phrase, scoped by year.
• Citation analysis. Get cited_cases for a known opinion and walk the citation graph.
• Jurisdictional studies. Restrict to a specific court (e.g. 158 for SCOTUS, 33 for New York state courts) and export the corpus.
• Litigation prep. Pre-load case-fact summaries into your case-management workflow.
• AI agent workflows. Drive this API over MCP from Claude (see below) to research case law in-conversation.

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⚙️ Input examples

Basic search

{
  "query": "patent infringement",
  "maxResults": 20
}

Court-filtered, year-bounded search

{
  "query": "First Amendment school speech",
  "maxResults": 30,
  "yearFrom": 2010,
  "yearTo": 2024,
  "courts": ["158"],
  "sortByDate": true
}

courts: ["158"] restricts to the Supreme Court of the United States. Leave courts empty to search every US state and federal court.

Fetch full case detail by ID

{
  "caseIds": [
    "1810530706706468549",
    "5036225562552830387"
  ]
}

Search and auto-fetch detail for every hit

{
  "query": "trademark dilution",
  "maxResults": 5,
  "fetchCaseDetailsForResults": true
}

Returns 5 search_result rows AND 5 case_detail rows in the dataset.

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🧾 Common court codes

Code	Court
(omitted / empty courts)	All US state and federal
158	Supreme Court of the United States
159	US Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit
160 to 172	US Courts of Appeals, 1st through DC Circuits
192	US Tax Court
33	New York state courts
5	California state courts

Any numeric court code shown in Google Scholar's case-law UI is accepted.

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🔌 Use this API from Claude (MCP)

This Actor is MCP-server-compatible. Once published to the Apify Store, it is reachable from any MCP client (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, etc.) via Apify's hosted MCP server at https://mcp.apify.com.

Add this to your MCP client config (e.g. ~/.claude/mcp.json or Claude Desktop's claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN"
      }
    }
  }
}

Then ask Claude:

"Use the Google Scholar Case Law API to find patent infringement cases from 2020 onward. Return the top 5 results, then fetch the full case detail for each one."

Claude will call this Actor through the MCP server. The input schema's field descriptions become tool-arg docs, and the structured dataset comes straight back into the conversation.

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💰 Pricing (pay-per-event)

Event	Price	When it fires
actor-start	$0.02	Once per Actor run, at startup.
search-result	$0.02	Per organic search result returned.
case-detail	$0.02	Per full case detail fetched.

A 10-result search costs $0.02 + 10 x $0.02 = $0.22. A 10-result search plus detail for every result costs $0.02 + 10 x $0.02 + 10 x $0.02 = $0.42.

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🗂️ Output format

Every dataset item has a result_type field. It is either "search_result", "case_detail", or "error". Filter the dataset on this field to separate the two kinds of rows. Search results carry result_id; case-detail rows carry case_id (they are the same identifier).

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Last Updated: 2026.05.14