American Judge and Justice API

Use these APIs to query and analyze thousands of federal and state court judges.

Overview

This data set is person-centric. All data links back to a particular person.

To learn more about this data, see our page about it on Free.law.

The available APIs include:

Judges and appointers
Positions held
Political affiliations
Educational histories
ABA ratings
Retention events
Data sources

Other types of data are linked to this API and have their own documentation, including:

In life, people can serve various roles in the justice system. Therefore, this is not strictly a database of judges, but rather a database of people and the positions they hold.

For example, William Taft served as president, where he appointed justices, but he was also a Supreme Court justice himself. Therefore, he has a single "person" record in the API, and two "position" records. The first position record is his role as president, and the second position record is his role as a justice.

There are a number of "granularity" fields for dates. These are used to indicate how granular a corresponding date is. For example, if we know the year somebody died but not the month or day, we would put 2010-01-01 as the date of death, and set the date of death granularity field to %Y.

This approach means that you can still — mostly — filter and sort by these date fields, but with an awareness that the data may be incomplete.

The APIs

People (Judges and Appointers)

/api/rest/v4/people/

This API contains the central "person" object. As explained above, people can be judges, appointers, or both.

This object holds the core metadata about the person, including their biographical data, positions held, educational history, ABA ratings, and political affiliations.

A few notes:

Position objects can be quite large, so they are linked in the person object instead of nested within it.
If the is_alias_of field has a value, that means the record represents a nickname for the person referenced in the alias field. Alias records make it possible to find a judge by name, even if they sometimes go by Bob instead of Robert. In our database, this field is a self-join.

In general, you will only want to work with judges where this field is null, indicating a record that represents a person, not an alias to a person.
The race and gender fields are not self-reported and should therefore be considered best guesses. We have done our best to gather these fields from reputable sources, but have also supplied values ourselves when it felt appropriate to do so. Some values may be incorrect.

To create choices for race, we used the U.S. census and added MENA (it has since been added to the census).
The has_photo field indicates whether we have a photo for the judge in our database of judge portraits.
The ftm_* fields relate to state court judges, who raise money for elections. Use these fields to link judges to their IDs on Follow The Money, where you can gather and analyze the details.

These fields have not been updated in many years, but we can do so as a service.

Positions

/api/rest/v4/positions/

Use this API to gather the positions held by a person, including their time as president, in private practice, as a judge, or in any number of other roles in society or the judiciary.

To look up field descriptions or options for filtering, ordering, or rendering, place an HTTP OPTIONS request.

To filter to positions for a particular person:

curl -v \
  --header 'Authorization: Token <your-token-here>' \
  "https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest/v4/positions/?person=20"

Political Affiliations

/api/rest/v4/political-affiliations/

Use this API to learn the political affiliations of a person. Political affiliations are gathered from a number of sources such as ballots or appointments, and have start and end dates.