CourtListener
From AltData.wiki, The Alternative Data Encyclopedia
CourtListener is a free legal research website sponsored by the nonprofit Free Law Project, containing millions of legal opinions from federal and state courts across 472 jurisdictions. Lawyers, journalists, academics, and the public use it to research cases, track case law as it develops, and perform large-scale analysis with raw data.[1]
The platform reports more than 8.3 million precedential opinions, a large archive of oral-argument audio, and tens of millions of API calls per ten-day period, alongside the RECAP archive of federal PACER filings, docket alerts, a judges database, and judicial financial disclosures.[1]
What It Does
CourtListener aggregates primary legal materials: case law from federal and state courts, federal PACER dockets and filings through its RECAP project, oral-argument recordings, a judicial database of judges, and judicial financial-disclosure records.[1]
Users can search opinions by case name, topic, or citation, look up citations, and set search and docket alerts that notify them when new opinions or filings appear.[1]
Products
Main collections include Case Law (millions of opinions searchable by keyword and semantic search and interlinked by a citator), the RECAP Archive of PACER data, Oral Arguments audio with custom podcast generation, a Judges database covering more than 16,000 American judges and appointers in the related Judge-DB project, and Financial Disclosures of federal judges, each exposed through versioned REST APIs.[1][2]
The citation graph is available via API, and for heavy users Free Law Project offers bulk data services and data consulting.[1][2]
Data And Methodology
Case law is downloaded from many jurisdictions on an ongoing basis; the site reported 10,014 opinions added in a recent ten-day window and 32.3 million API calls in the same period. Its oral-argument collection has been described as the largest collection of American oral-argument audio.[1][2]
RECAP extends the fee-based PACER system: users of the RECAP browser extension contribute documents they purchase, which are then shared freely through the archive. The project was originally created in 2009 at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy and Harvard's Berkman Center before being maintained by Free Law Project; its name is PACER spelled backward.[2]
Delivery And Pricing
Access is free of charge through the website, APIs, Atom/RSS feeds, podcasts, and bulk downloads. The project is funded by donations, memberships in Free Law Project, and paid data services.[1]
History
Free Law Project is an Oakland-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded on September 24, 2013 by Michael Lissner and Brian Carver to provide free access to primary legal materials, develop legal research tools, and support academic research on legal corpora; CourtListener is its open-source flagstone platform, together with RECAP, Juriscraper, and Bots.law.[1][2]
The project's data has supported major investigative journalism: it helped The Wall Street Journal expose 138 federal judges who violated federal conflict-of-interest law through undisclosed hearings involving their own financial holdings.[2]
Landscape
In the alternative-data market, CourtListener's litigation, docket, and judicial-disclosure feeds complement commercial legal-analytics vendors, offering a free primary source for event-driven strategies that track companies, sectors, or judges through court records.