CourtListener Scraper - US Case Law & Court Opinions

Search US case law and court opinions via the free CourtListener API (Free Law Project). Search by keyword and get clean rows with case name, court, date filed, docket number, judge, parallel citations, cite count and precedential status. No API key required.

What you get per result

Field	Meaning
caseName / url / id	Case name, CourtListener URL, and id
court / courtId / jurisdiction	Deciding court and jurisdiction
dateFiled / dateArgued	Filing and argument dates
docketNumber / docketId	Docket number and id
judge / status	Authoring judge and precedential status
citation / neutralCite / lexisCite / citeCount	Parallel citations and how often the case is cited
suitNature / posture / syllabus	Nature of suit, procedural posture, syllabus (when recorded)

Input

{ "searchQueries": ["first amendment", "copyright infringement"], "searchType": "opinions", "maxItemsPerQuery": 100 }

• Search terms - keywords, party names or legal phrases, one per line.
• Search type - opinions (case law), recap (PACER dockets) or oral-arguments.
• Import from a file - paste a list, or link a public .txt/.csv, a Google Sheet/Drive link, or an Apify key-value-store record.
• Output fields - trim every record to exactly the columns you need.
• Optional API token for higher rate limits (free from CourtListener).

Leave everything empty and the run returns a small free sample so you can see the shape first.

Reliability

Reads the official CourtListener REST v4 API directly - structured, no headless browser, no scraping of blocked pages. A search that matches nothing, or an import that cannot be read, bills $0 and says why. Long runs stop cleanly before the timeout and save everything collected so far.

Honest limits

• Case-law records vary in completeness. Parallel citations, judge, argument date, syllabus, posture and nature-of-suit are recorded only for the subset of courts/eras that publish them, so those fields are often empty - that is the source data, not a gap. Core fields (case name, court, date filed, docket, status, URL, cite count) are always present.

Pricing

$0.002 per result on the FREE tier (tiered pricing lowers it with volume). Only results actually saved are billed; empty searches and unreadable imports cost nothing.

Output views

• Results - case name, court, date filed, docket, cite count and the URL.

Use with AI assistants (MCP)

Available through the Apify MCP server - an agent can pull relevant case law for a legal question, build a citation graph, or monitor new opinions on a topic in one call.