🏛️ Federal Court Locator Scraper

🚀 Pull every US federal court with PACER ID, RSS feed, citation, and jurisdiction. Filter by court type, state, or name. No login, no API key.

The Federal Court Locator Scraper returns every US federal court (district, bankruptcy, appellate, special) with PACER court ID, FJC court ID, RSS feed status, court URL, jurisdiction code, citation string, parent court, and active flag. Each record also includes capability flags for opinion and oral argument scrapers, which Court Listener tracks per court.

The Court Listener REST API is the de-facto canonical machine-readable source for federal court structure, used by Free Law Project, RECAP, and many legal-tech tools. The official PACER court locator is JS-rendered and hard to scrape directly. This Actor reads Court Listener's clean public API and returns federal court metadata as structured records in seconds.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Legal tech engineers, journalists, docket aggregators, legal researchers	Court directory builds, RSS feed aggregation, jurisdiction lookup, legal mapping

📋 What the Federal Court Locator Scraper does

Three filtering workflows in a single run:

• 🏛️ Jurisdiction filter. All, federal (F), federal district (FD), federal bankruptcy (FB), federal appellate, federal special.
• ⚙️ Active-only flag. Filter to courts currently in active use.
• 🔍 Name filter. Substring match on the full court name.

Each row reports the Court Listener slug ID, PACER court ID, FJC court ID, short and full court name, citation string, jurisdiction code, official court website URL, RSS feed availability and entry types, in-use flag, opinion and oral argument scraper capability, position number, start date, end date, parent court, and Court Listener resource URI.

💡 Why it matters: legal tech tools, docket aggregators, and journalism workflows all need a clean federal court directory. Building one from scratch means crawling JS-rendered PACER pages and hitting captchas. Court Listener publishes the same data as a free REST API, and this Actor turns it into one-click structured rows.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: citationString, courtId, courtUrl, endDate, fjcCourtId, fullName, hasOpinionScraper, hasOralArgumentScraper, inUse, jurisdiction, pacerCourtId, pacerHasRssFeed, pacerRssEntryTypes, parentCourt, position, resourceUri, scrapedAt, shortName, startDate. All 19 field names come from a real production run, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. 🆓 Create a free Apify account. Sign up here and get $5 in free credit.
2. 🔍 Open the Actor. Search for "Federal Court Locator" in the Apify Store.
3. ⚙️ Pick filters. Jurisdiction, in-use flag, optional name filter.
4. ▶️ Click Start. A 100-court run typically completes in 10 to 20 seconds.
5. 📥 Download. Export as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from sign-up to first dataset: under five minutes.

🔗 Recommended Actors

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• 🅱️ Bing Search Scraper - search the open web for case-related news.
• 🦆 DuckDuckGo Search Scraper - alternative SERP signal alongside court data.
• 🕰️ Wayback Machine CDX Scraper - audit historical court website versions.

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more pre-built scrapers and data tools.

PACER, FJC, and Court Listener are property of their respective owners. Court Listener is operated by Free Law Project, a 501(c)(3) non-profit. This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by PACER, FJC, or Free Law Project. It uses only the public Court Listener REST API.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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