US Court Records Scraper — Opinions & Dockets (CourtListener)

Search millions of US federal and state court opinions and dockets from CourtListener (the Free Law Project) and get clean, structured JSON. Find case law and dockets by keyword, court, and date — with case name, court, judge, citations, docket number, and a direct link. Built for legal research, litigation intelligence, compliance, and AI/legal-tech pipelines. No API key required.

Keywords: CourtListener API, US court records, case law API, court opinions scraper, legal research API, PACER alternative, docket data, legal-tech data.

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Why this actor

CourtListener hosts one of the largest open collections of US case law and federal dockets, with an excellent API — but it uses cursor pagination and returns dozens of fields per result. This actor wraps it into one clean record per case, so you can go from a query to a usable table in seconds.

• Opinions or dockets — search published case law or RECAP federal dockets.
• Filters — keyword/phrase, specific court (scotus, ca9, ded…), and filing-date range.
• Clean output — case name, court, judge, citations, docket number, status, nature of suit, and a click-ready URL.
• Deep pagination — pull a handful or thousands.
• No API key — keyless by default; add a free CourtListener token for higher rate limits.

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What you can build

• Litigation intelligence — track all cases mentioning a company, patent, statute, or topic.
• Legal research automation — assemble a citation-ranked corpus on an issue.
• Docket monitoring — watch new filings in a court or matter on a schedule.
• AI / legal-tech — feed opinions into a RAG pipeline or case-summarization model.
• Compliance & risk — surface enforcement actions and rulings by topic.

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Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
query	string	patent infringement	Words or quoted phrase.
resultType	enum	opinions	opinions (case law) or dockets (RECAP).
court	string	—	Restrict to a court id (e.g. scotus, ca9).
dateFrom / dateTo	string	—	Filing-date window YYYY-MM-DD.
maxResults	integer	200	Max records.
apiToken	string	—	Optional free CourtListener token (higher limits).

Example

{ "query": "\"summary judgment\"", "resultType": "opinions", "court": "ca9", "dateFrom": "2020-01-01", "maxResults": 500 }

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Output

{
  "case_name": "In Re '318 Patent Infringement Litigation",
  "court": "District Court, D. Delaware",
  "court_id": "ded",
  "date_filed": "2008-09-26",
  "docket_number": "Civ. 05-356-SLR",
  "judge": "Sue L. Robinson",
  "citations": ["578 F. Supp. 2d 711"],
  "cite_count": 1,
  "status": "Published",
  "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2404252/in-re-318-patent-infringement-litigation/",
  "scraped_at": "2026-06-12T00:00:00.000Z"
}

A final {"_type":"summary"} record reports total matches and how many were returned.

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Pricing

First 25 records free per account, then $0.003 per record. Zero charge on empty searches. No monthly rental. No API key required (a free token just raises rate limits).

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FAQ

Do I need a key? No. Keyless by default; a free CourtListener token raises your rate limit for large pulls.

Opinions vs dockets? Opinions are published case law; dockets are RECAP federal case dockets. Pick with resultType.

How do I restrict to a court? Pass the CourtListener court id (e.g. scotus, ca9, ded).

Is this legal? Yes — CourtListener is the Free Law Project's open API for public court records.