Legal APIs and Data
We currently have five major services we make available according to commercial agreements and Free Law Project memberships.
These services allow a variety of researchers, journalists, and organizations to access vast troves of legal information.
If you need the fastest and most granular form of our data, we recommend our database replication service. This unique service provides an isolated logical replica of our PostgreSQL database that you can query with SQL.
If you are interested in obtaining large quantities of our data, we recommend using bulk data files. These provide CSV files of our case law, people, and financial disclosures databases.
If you require less data, want to verify citations, want to automate searches or alerts, or if you want to crawl PACER, we recommend using our REST APIs.
If you want to subscribe to events on CourtListener, we recommend our webhooks service, which works as a bi-directional API — It can push data to you.
Our MCP server allows tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI assistants to access our CourtListener data and APIs directly.
| Learn More About... | Update Speed | Data Fidelity | Query Flexibility | Learning Curve | Setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Replication | Instant | Complete | Unlimited SQL Queries | Short | Managed |
| Bulk Data | Slow | Great | None | Short | None |
| REST APIs | Fast | Good | Filters & Joins | Longer | None |
| Webhooks | Instant | Good | Subscribe to Events | Medium | Complex |
| MCP Server | Fast | Good | Natural Language | Short | Easy |
Pricing
Free Law Project is a small non-profit that partners with organizations and individuals to pursue its mission. APIs are available as a membership benefit and through commercial agreements.
This approach aims to fairly and broadly serve a variety of researchers, journalists, and organizations.
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We're Proud of our Data
For over a decade, we have worked to make the data in CourtListener the best on the Web.
Among the minor enhancements we make on a regular basis, we've made significant improvements to our data that you won't find in other sources:
When we import other data sources, we clean them up. For example, we manually corrected more than ten thousand items from Public.Resource.Org, and we have cleaned up or fixed more than one million items in Harvard's Caselaw Access Project.
We have added exact dates of older Supreme Court cases from the Library of Congress, enhancing thousands of cases beyond what's available anywhere else.
We are scanning millions of pages directly from the case law books.
We use open records requests and manual data entry to build our datasets of judges and financial disclosures.
Read our coverage documentation to learn more.