aid: court-listener
name: CourtListener
description: >
  CourtListener is a free legal research platform operated by the Free Law Project,
  a nonprofit organization. It provides a comprehensive REST API for accessing US court
  opinions, dockets, oral arguments, judge biographical data, financial disclosures, and
  citation networks from federal and state courts. The platform archives over 9 million
  case law decisions, 500 million PACER-related items, 3.4 million minutes of oral arguments,
  and data on 16,000+ judges. Access is available through a membership model with rate limits
  scaling by tier; an EDU tier is free for academic users.
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/apis-json-logo.jpg
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/court-listener/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
created: '2026-06-13'
modified: '2026-06-13'
specificationVersion: '0.19'
tags:
  - Legal
  - Court Data
  - Case Law
  - PACER
  - Judicial
  - Citations
  - Oral Arguments
  - Federal Courts
  - State Courts
  - Open Data
apis:
  - aid: court-listener:court-listener-rest-api
    name: CourtListener REST API
    description: >
      REST API v4.4 providing programmatic access to US court opinions, PACER docket data,
      judge records, financial disclosures, oral argument audio, citation lookup and network
      analysis, search alerts, and case visualizations. Supports Token, Cookie/Session, and
      HTTP Basic authentication. Returns JSON, HTML, or XML.
    image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/apis-json-logo.jpg
    humanURL: https://www.courtlistener.com/help/api/rest/
    baseURL: https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest/v4/
    tags:
      - Legal
      - Court Data
      - Case Law
      - Dockets
      - Judges
      - Citations
      - Oral Arguments
      - PACER
    properties:
      - type: Documentation
        url: https://wiki.free.law/c/courtlistener/help/api/rest/v4/overview
      - type: OpenAPI
        url: https://github.com/freelawproject/court-listener-api-definition/blob/master/court-listener-api.json
      - type: OpenAPI
        url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/court-listener/refs/heads/main/openapi/court-listener-openapi.json
      - type: PythonSDK
        url: https://github.com/freelawproject/courtlistener-api-client
    contact:
      - FN: Free Law Project
        url: https://free.law/contact/
        email: info@free.law
common:
  - type: Website
    url: https://www.courtlistener.com/
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://wiki.free.law/c/courtlistener/help/api/rest/v4/overview
  - type: GitHubOrg
    url: https://github.com/freelawproject
  - type: LinkedIn
    url: https://www.linkedin.com/company/free-law-project
  - type: Blog
    url: https://free.law/blog/
  - type: Pricing
    url: https://free.law/membership
  - type: X
    url: https://x.com/FreeLawProject
  - type: Plans
    url: plans/court-listener-plans-pricing.yml
  - type: RateLimits
    url: rate-limits/court-listener-rate-limits.yml
  - type: FinOps
    url: finops/court-listener-finops.yml
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: kin@apievangelist.com