REST API Change Log
Version 4
v4.4
Adds bankruptcy information support. This release introduces:
- A new
bankruptcy_informationfield in the /dockets endpoint that links to detailed bankruptcy metadata when available. - A new /bankruptcy-information endpoint providing access to bankruptcy-specific data including chapter, trustee information, and key dates.
v4.3
Enhances security by enforcing authentication in V4 API endpoints. Anonymous requests now receive a 401 Unauthorized response. This change affects the following endpoints:
v4.2
Enhances support for Field Selection in nested resources via the fields and omit parameters to reduce payload size and improve response times. Clients can now select nested fields (e.g. fields=educations__date_modified) or exclude them (e.g. omit=recap_documents__plain_text), allowing fine-grained control over serialized nested data. (Issue #5748, PR #5973)
v4.1
This release introduces a number of enhancements aimed at improving the efficiency and flexibility of your data retrieval.
- Enhanced Paginated Endpoints: Introduced the count=on query parameter to efficiently retrieve total item counts without fetching actual data (Issue #4506, PR #4715).
- Search Results: Improved search results across all search types by incorporating score values to the payload (Issue #4312, PR #4712).
- Flexible Docket Entry Sorting: The Docket Entry endpoint now supports sorting results by
recap_sequence_numberandentry_number. This added flexibility allows you to customize your data retrieval to meet specific requirements. (Issue #4061, PR #4700). - Deeper Filtering for Parties and Attorneys: The parties and attorneys API endpoints has been upgraded with the
filter_nested_results=Truequery parameter. This enables granular filtering of nested data, providing more control over the retrieved information. (Issue #4054, PR #4729). - Enhanced Court Filtering: The
parent_courtquery parameter has been added to the Court endpoint, allowing you to filter results based on parent-child relationships between courts. (Issue #4711, PR #4744).
v4.0
Migrate search to ElasticSearch and enable cursor-based pagination. See the Migration Guide for details.
Version 3
v3.15
Allow deep pagination on the Court endpoint, add docket_id to the Clusters endpoint, and add cluster_id and author_id to the Opinions endpoint.
v3.14
This release blocks users from paginating past page 100 in the API. This release is not backwards incompatible, but is being released on an emergency basis to stop crawlers that have been impacting our database tier. In our performance documentation, we have long warned against using deep pagination. Now it is blocked. If you need this functionality for your application, please consider using filters to complete your crawling instead.
v3.13
This version adds data from newly added judicial financial disclosure documents. This data is now included in a series of new endpoints to explore financial disclosures. For example, you can filter by gifts received by a specific federal judge or district.
The new endpoints include gifts, reimbursements, disclosure-positions, agreements, debts, investments, spouse-income, non-investment-incomes and financial-disclosures. For an understanding of these fields, see the endpoint documentation.
v3.12
This version deprecates the experimental Core API interface we tried previously. Swagger/OpenAPI has become the standard. Our support of OpenAPI remains experimental, but our toolkit should support it better than previously.
Many endpoints can only be filtered by specific values. For example, to filter the educations endpoint to only bachelor's degrees, you'd use degree_level=ba as part of your GET request. In the past, if invalid filter values were used, zero results would be returned because zero items would match that query. This made sense, but did not help users identify their error. These values now return a 400 status code and an error message instead.
v3.11
This version adds several fields and changes one.
Person.date_completed: The date and time the person was last considered complete.
Person.dod_country and Person.dob_country: The country where a person was born or died.
Position.sector: Whether a position was in the private or public sector.
Court.date_last_pacer_contact: This will track the last time we contacted PACER for a court.
Court.pacer_rss_entry_types: This will track the types of entries available in a court's PACER RSS feed.
Position.date_started is now a nullable field.
v3.10
This version introduces the visualization APIs.
v3.9
This version adds attachment page fetching to the RECAP fetch API.
v3.8
This version adds fields to support Harvard case law data. This includes correction, cross_reference, disposition, headnotes, history, other_dates and summary fields for Cluster endpoint, and joined_by_str and xml_harvard fields for Opinion endpoint.
v3.7
This version adds data from the Federal Judicial Center's Integrated Database. This data is now included in a new endpoint and as a new idb_data key in the Docket object. For an understanding of these fields, see the endpoint documentation.
v3.6
This version deprecated the numerous federal_cite_one, neutral_cite, lexis_cite, and other citation fields, replacing them with a nested field called citations. The old fields will continue receiving updates until February 1, 2019, and will be removed on May 1, 2019.
v3.5
This version adds the mdl_status field to the docket endpoint.
v3.4
This version adds the file_size field to the RECAP document endpoint. This field contains the size (in bytes) of any document that we have.
v3.3
This version added a variety of appellate fields to the docket object including a new related item called the OriginalCourtInformation. See the Original Court endpoint documentation.
The new fields added to the docket include appeal_from, appeal_from_str, originating_court_information, panel, panel_str, appellate_fee_status, and appellate_case_type_information.
v3.2
This version added the id field to many of the endpoints.
v3.1
This version added experimental Swagger and Core API implementations.
v3.0
Upgraded and overhauled the API to use the Django REST Framework.
Version 2
v2.0
For original documentation, see: /help/api/rest/v2/
Version 1
v1.0
mike