⚖️ CourtListener Opinions Scraper

🚀 Export US federal and state court opinions in seconds. Pull the latest published opinions from the Supreme Court, federal Circuit Courts of Appeals, District Courts, and specialty tribunals straight into clean CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-25 · 📊 7 fields per record · 46+ courts supported · Free Law Project / public domain

CourtListener is a free legal research project run by Free Law Project. This scraper reads the public Atom feeds for every court that CourtListener tracks and turns each opinion into a structured record with title, URL, court name, publication date, summary, and direct PDF link. No CourtListener account or API token required.

Coverage includes the Supreme Court of the United States, all 13 federal Circuit Courts of Appeals (including the Federal Circuit and D.C. Circuit), specialty courts like the Court of International Trade, the Court of Federal Claims, the Tax Court, the FISA Court and its Court of Review, and dozens of high-traffic federal District Courts (S.D.N.Y., N.D. Cal., E.D. Va., S.D. Fla. and more). Pick a single court or use the high-volume "All Courts" stream.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Legal researchers, paralegals, law firms, journalists, academics, legaltech engineers	Build case alert feeds, monitor a specific circuit, populate a legal data warehouse, train legal NLP models, track federal litigation trends

📋 What the CourtListener Opinions Scraper does

• Pulls the latest opinions from a chosen court Atom feed
• Decodes titles, links, courts, publication dates, and short summaries
• Returns a direct PDF link for each opinion when available
• Supports 46+ courts from the Supreme Court to high-traffic district courts
• Exports clean tabular data to CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML

💡 Why it matters: legal research products and academic studies need raw, structured opinion data. This Actor delivers it in seconds without scraping court websites individually.

🎬 Full Demo (🚧 Coming soon)

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
court	select	Yes	Court identifier (e.g. scotus, ca9, all)
maxItems	integer	No	Max records to return. Free plan capped at 10.

{
    "court": "scotus",
    "maxItems": 10
}

{
    "court": "ca9",
    "maxItems": 50
}

⚠️ Good to Know: CourtListener's feeds return the most recent opinions per court. To go deeper into the historical archive you can chain runs across multiple courts or schedule daily runs to capture all new filings.

📊 Output

Field	Type	Description
📌 title	string	Case caption
🔗 url	string	CourtListener opinion page URL
🏛️ court	string	Full court name
📅 publishedDate	string	ISO publication timestamp
📄 pdfUrl	string	Direct PDF download URL
📝 summary	string	First-paragraph excerpt of the opinion
🕒 scrapedAt	string	Run timestamp
❌ error	string	Null on success

Sample record:

{
    "title": "M & K Employee Solutions, Inc. v. Trustees of IAM Nat. Pension",
    "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/10862762/m-k-employee-solutions-inc-v-trustees-of-iam-nat-pension/",
    "court": "Supreme Court of the United States",
    "publishedDate": "2026-05-21T00:00:00-07:00",
    "pdfUrl": "https://storage.courtlistener.com/pdf/2026/05/21/m__k_employee_solutions_inc._v._trustees_of_iam_nat._pension.pdf",
    "summary": "(Slip Opinion) OCTOBER TERM, 2025 1 Syllabus NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released ...",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-05-25T17:40:00.000Z",
    "error": null
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

🔥 Reason	Why it matters
🆓 No CourtListener account or token required	Run instantly without setup
🏛️ 46+ courts covered	Federal supreme, appellate, district, specialty
⚡ Atom-feed source	Stable structure, fast responses
📦 Clean tabular output	Drop straight into BI, Sheets, a database
🔁 Schedule daily	Build case alerts cheaply

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Setup	Cost	Output Quality
CourtListener REST API	Account + token	Free	Excellent (auth-gated)
Scraping court websites individually	Per-court engineering	High	Mixed
This Actor	None	Pay-per-use	Clean, normalized

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account with $5 credit
2. Open the CourtListener Opinions Scraper
3. Pick a court from the dropdown
4. Set maxItems
5. Click Start and download CSV / Excel / JSON / XML when the run completes

💼 Business use cases

Legaltech and case alerting

Schedule daily runs against the courts your clients care about. Push deltas into your alerting product or CRM.

Law firm internal research

Feed structured case lists into Westlaw / Lexis enrichment pipelines. Pre-screen opinions for relevance with internal classifiers.

Academic research

Build training corpora for legal NLP (citation extraction, outcome prediction, holding classification) across decades of circuit opinions.

Journalism

Track which circuits are issuing rulings on a hot statute. Surface fresh opinions for newsroom coverage without manual checking.

🔌 Automating CourtListener Opinions Scraper

Run on a schedule and pipe results into Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub Actions, or Google Drive. Apify's integrations make webhooks, dataset webhooks, and storage exports trivial.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

Research

Construct historical datasets for academic study of judicial opinion trends.

Personal

Track opinions in your home district for civic engagement and personal interest.

Non-profit

Power legal aid dashboards with up-to-date opinion data.

Experimentation

Train or benchmark legal LLMs against published opinions.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open this Actor's page in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Copilot and ask for help wiring it into your workflow.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Do I need a CourtListener account? A: No. This Actor reads only the public Atom feeds.

Q: Which courts can I scrape? A: SCOTUS, all 13 federal Circuit Courts of Appeals, specialty federal courts, and many high-traffic district courts. See the dropdown for the full list.

Q: How fresh is the data? A: As fresh as CourtListener's feed updates, typically same-day for most courts.

Q: Does it return full opinion text? A: It returns the title, URL, summary excerpt, and a direct PDF link. For full opinion text, follow the PDF URL.

Q: Can I scrape historical opinions? A: Feeds return the latest items per court. For deep historical archives, use CourtListener's authenticated REST API directly.

Q: Is the data accurate? A: It mirrors what CourtListener publishes. Free Law Project is a respected source.

Q: Can I export to Excel? A: Yes. Apify lets you export CSV, Excel, JSON, XML directly from the dataset.

Q: How do I schedule daily runs? A: Use Apify's built-in Schedules feature on the actor page.

Q: What about state courts? A: This Actor focuses on federal courts. CourtListener does cover some state courts via its API.

Q: Will this break if CourtListener changes the feed? A: We monitor and update the parser when feeds change.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Apify supports Make, Zapier, n8n, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub Actions, Google Sheets, Google Drive, AWS, Azure, BigQuery, Snowflake, and any HTTP-aware tool via webhooks.

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🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form

⚠️ Disclaimer: This is an independent tool not affiliated with CourtListener or Free Law Project. Only publicly available data is collected. Opinions remain in the public domain per Free Law Project's terms.