CourtListener Case Law Search - Legal Opinions Diligence

CourtListener Scraper - Case Law & Legal Opinions API

Search the public CourtListener opinion corpus for US federal and state case law. Filter by full-text query, court, filing date, reporter citation, docket number, and publication status, then export source-linked JSON, CSV, or Excel records for legal research, monitoring, compliance, and RAG workflows.

Data source update (Oct 2026): CourtListener's REST search API now requires an account token, so this actor reads CourtListener's public opinion search feed instead. No token is needed. Each result includes case name, court and court ID (federal courts), filing date, cluster ID, opinion link and a matching text snippet, newest first. Detailed fields such as judges, citations, citation counts and docket numbers are kept for schema compatibility but are now empty; open opinionUrl for the full opinion. Citation and docket-number inputs are applied as search terms.

The default run searches artificial intelligence copyright and returns at most 5 paid records. At the default 128 MB memory and live pricing, the maximum first-run charge is approximately $0.0101 ($0.0001 start + 5 × $0.002).

What each paid result contains

• case name, full case name, court, CourtListener court ID, and jurisdiction fields;
• filing and argument dates, docket number, docket ID, and opinion-cluster ID;
• judge/panel evidence, reporter/neutral/Lexis citations, and CourtListener citation count;
• publication status, suit nature, posture, procedural history, and syllabus when reported;
• every opinion document included in the search result, including type, author ID, per-curiam flag, cited-opinion IDs, snippets, and source/download links;
• exact source API URL, retrieval time, bounded query scope, candidate count, result rank, and mandatory coverage/interpretation notices;
• an explicit no_match evidence row when the bounded search returns no matching opinion.

Arrays are always emitted as [] rather than null, including on no-match output.

Input

Field	Description	Example
query	Full-text words or quoted phrases	artificial intelligence copyright
court	CourtListener court ID	scotus, ca9, dcd, nysd
dateFrom	Filed on/after, YYYY-MM-DD	2024-01-01
dateTo	Filed on/before, YYYY-MM-DD	2026-12-31
status	Exact Published or Unpublished result status	Published
citation	Exact reporter citation	410 U.S. 113
docketNumber	Exact docket number	70-18
orderBy	relevance, newest, or oldest	relevance
maxResults	Total paid-result cap, 1–5,000	5

status is enforced against the returned CourtListener status across paginated candidates rather than sent as an unsupported source parameter. maxResults is a total response cap, and the live buyer charge budget can lower it before the source is queried.

Examples

Recent Ninth Circuit opinions mentioning artificial intelligence

{
  "query": "artificial intelligence",
  "court": "ca9",
  "dateFrom": "2024-01-01",
  "orderBy": "newest",
  "maxResults": 10
}

Exact citation search

{
  "query": "",
  "citation": "410 U.S. 113",
  "maxResults": 5
}

Example output shape

{
  "setupStatus": "found",
  "caseName": "Electronic Privacy Information Center v. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence",
  "court": "District Court, District of Columbia",
  "courtId": "dcd",
  "dateFiled": "2020-06-01",
  "docketNumber": "Civil Action No. 2019-2906",
  "status": "Published",
  "citations": [],
  "opinionCount": 1,
  "opinionTypes": ["combined-opinion"],
  "opinionUrl": "https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4757780/electronic-privacy-information-center-v-national-security-commission-on/",
  "source": "CourtListener opinion search (Free Law Project public corpus)",
  "sourceRetrievedAt": "2026-07-25T00:00:00Z",
  "coverageNotice": "CourtListener is a non-governmental public archive assembled from many court sources...",
  "interpretationNotice": "This output is research evidence, not an official court copy, Shepardization/KeyCite treatment, legal advice..."
}

Fields absent from the source remain empty. The sample is shortened; live records use stable keys and include nested opinion-document evidence.

Pricing and bulk safety

Live pricing is:

• $0.0001 actor-start event per GB of reserved memory, minimum one event;
• $0.002 per default dataset item.

Results	Maximum item charge	Approximate total at default memory
5	$0.010	$0.0101
100	$0.200	$0.2001
1,000	$2.000	$2.0001

Output is persisted in size-bounded batches to avoid Apify's dataset request limit. Preview a narrow query before requesting a large corpus.

Evidence boundaries

CourtListener is maintained by the nonprofit Free Law Project; it is not a court and is not an official court-record system. Its corpus combines many sources, so coverage, metadata, citation counts, document links, and text can be delayed, incomplete, duplicated, corrected, or unavailable. A bounded no_match means only that this query found no match in the searched public corpus.

A CourtListener status or citation count does not establish that an opinion remains precedential, controlling, unmodified, or good law. The output is not an official court copy, Shepardization/KeyCite treatment, identity verification, legal advice, or a substitute for reviewing the linked opinion and current authoritative sources.

Source and reliability

• Source: CourtListener public REST API, maintained by the Free Law Project
• Authentication: none required for this public search workflow
• Reliability: retries request, body-read, rate-limit, and retryable HTTP failures with bounded backoff
• Scope: opinion/case-law search (type=o), not the separate RECAP federal docket archive