Google Scholar Case Law Scraper

Search and scrape US court opinions from Google Scholar's case law database. Filter by keywords, courts, and date ranges to collect structured legal data for research, citation analysis, and AI training.

What it does

This actor searches Google Scholar's case law index and returns structured records for each matching opinion. You supply a search query, optional court filter, and optional date range. The actor paginates through results up to your specified limit, extracting key metadata from each case. Optionally, it can fetch the full opinion text from each case's detail page.

Use cases

• Legal research: Find cases citing a specific doctrine or precedent across all US courts
• Citation analysis: Track how many cases cite a landmark opinion over time
• Legal AI training data: Collect labeled case text with court, date, and citation metadata
• Litigation support: Research how courts in a specific jurisdiction have ruled on an issue
• Academic research: Longitudinal studies of judicial trends on constitutional questions

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
query	string	Yes	Search keywords (e.g. "fourth amendment search and seizure")
court	string	No	Court filter: all (default), federal (all federal courts), or state (all state courts)
dateStart	string	No	Start year for date filter (e.g. "2020")
dateEnd	string	No	End year for date filter (e.g. "2024")
fetchFullText	boolean	No	Fetch full opinion text from detail pages (default: false)
maxItems	integer	No	Maximum number of results to return (default: 10)

Example input:

{
  "query": "first amendment freedom of speech public forum",
  "court": "federal",
  "dateStart": "2015",
  "dateEnd": "2024",
  "fetchFullText": false,
  "maxItems": 50
}

Output

Each result record contains:

Field	Description
case_name	Full case name (e.g. "Miranda v. Arizona")
citation	Legal citation extracted from metadata (e.g. "384 U.S. 436 (1966)")
court	Court that decided the case
date_decided	Year or date the case was decided
snippet	Search result excerpt showing relevant passages
full_text	Full opinion text (only when fetchFullText: true)
cited_by_count	Number of cases citing this opinion
cited_by_url	Google Scholar URL to the list of citing cases
related_cases_url	Google Scholar URL to related cases
versions_count	Number of other sources reporting this case
source	Source publication from the metadata line
scholar_url	Direct Google Scholar URL for this case
pdf_url	PDF URL when available
case_id	Google Scholar internal case ID

Example output record:

{
  "case_name": "Terry v. Ohio",
  "citation": "392 US 1 (1968)",
  "court": "Supreme Court of the United States",
  "date_decided": "1968",
  "snippet": "...the Fourth Amendment applies to stop and frisk by police officers...",
  "cited_by_count": 18234,
  "cited_by_url": "https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=...",
  "scholar_url": "https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=17773605790797706504",
  "case_id": "17773605790797706504",
  "full_text": null
}

Notes

• Results are retrieved from Google Scholar's public case law index. Coverage includes US Supreme Court, federal circuit and district courts, and state appellate courts.
• The court: "federal" filter covers all federal courts (Supreme Court, circuit courts, district courts). Use court: "all" to include state court opinions.
• Setting fetchFullText: true significantly increases run time and resource usage since the actor must load each case's detail page individually.
• Google Scholar does not expose a public API, so this actor uses a real browser to render pages. Each run consumes proportionally more resources than a basic HTML scraper.
• Date filters use year-level granularity only (YYYY format).