I can't find something I think should be in CourtListener. Help?
CourtListner has around half a billion records spanning case law, filings, oral argument recordings, financial disclosures, and more.
Sometimes it is hard to find what you're looking for. This article provides some guidance for common problems and questions you may run into.
Search the Correct Database
The biggest issue you may have is that you are looking in the wrong database. CourtListener does not have a single unified search engine, but instead has several that search different types of content. Similar to how Google Images returns pictures, and Google Shopping returns products, if you search the wrong search engine on CourtListener, you won't find what you're looking for.
In general:
- Search case law in the case law database
- Search filings and federal cases in the RECAP Archive
- Search oral argument recordings and transcripts in the oral argument database
- Search financial disclosures in the financial disclosure database
Know What Is In CourtListener
We aim to have the most complete collection of legal information on the Internet, but it's impossible to have everything. It's important to understand what we do and do not have.
To understand these details, read our coverage documentation for the relevant database.
Subtleties to be Aware Of
A few gaps are worth knowing in particular:
We don't have every citation.
Many legal citations are created by for-profit publishers like Westlaw and LexisNexis. When this is the case, the only way to get these citations is to scan and digitize their books. This is a laborious process we are now doing, but we have a gap between about 2018 and today that will take several more months to plug. So if you are using a citation to look up a recent case, we may have the case but lack the citation itself.
The solution to this is a system called "Neutral Citations," in which courts generate official citations for their decisions themselves, without relying on the third-party publishers. Neutral citations are adopted at over a dozen states, and we have a campaign to encourage other courts to use them too.
No system has every legal decision.
Indeed, nobody even really knows what it means to have every legal decision or even, for that matter, what a legal decision technically is.
For example, do you consider decisions from Article I courts such as the Tax Court or the military courts to be included in "everything"? What about territorial courts, the FISA courts, or immigration courts? LexisNexis adds thousands of federal orders to its case law database but Westlaw does not and we take a middle ground. No online database has collected the decisions from American Samoa (we're working on it!).
A better question is, "Do you have the important decisions in a particular jurisdiction?" To answer this question, we've created a detailed page that has information about the hundreds of courts we do cover.
We don't have every filing.
Several of the data source we have on CourtListener are only available behind a paywall. Famously, the system for federal cases and filings, known as PACER, charges ten cents per page for federal filings. When this is the case, no research platform in the world can afford to purchase all of the content — each simply does the best it can.
Advanced Filters and Operators
If you can't find something you think we should have, the next thing to do is refine your query to find what you're looking for.
Review our advanced filtering documentation to learn more about how to do that.
mike