CourtListener.com Content Removal Policy

The Board of Directors of Free Law Project, the non-profit sponsoring CourtListener, believes that there is a compelling public interest in making the law broadly available to all. In pursuit of this goal, we have poured our energies into making CourtListener.com the best free legal research tool that we can. Occasionally however, there can be competing privacy interests of individuals and organizations. This policy describes the balance that we attempt to strike when thinking about this conflict of interests, and describes our policy for accepting and working with removal requests.

If you would like a case removed from the results of the major search engines, please send us a request using the contact page. You must include links to the pages you would like removed. Upon receiving this request, we will generally block search engines from indexing pages on our site by using the robots HTML meta tag and/or the x-robots-tag HTTP header.

We will not remove any public document from our database without a court order. If you want information deleted from our site, your only recourse is to get it deleted from the public record and to obtain a court order demanding that we do the same. If you are able to furnish such a court order, we will generally remove the document from our site. If the court order demands an expungement or redaction, we will generally anonymize or redact cases by replacing names with initials or black boxes, and placing a note at the top of the document explaining the change. We will not make changes to any other documents without a court order that specifically requires that we do so.

After we have blocked the pages, they will eventually be removed from all search engines, however, as is mentioned above, your case is a public document, and there may be other copies of it on the Internet – Although we will have blocked the search engines from finding your case, there may be other websites that have copies of it. In addition, we have no control over any search engine, and they may not remove your case from their results for many months, if at all.

If, after reading the above, you would still like to have a case blocked so it is not found by search engines, please send your written request as described above.

Placing court documents online is a form of First Amendment expression that is protected by numerous state and federal statutes. Despite this, we have occasionally been sued for doing exercising this right. It is against our mission to lose such a case. We never have. We have even fought back against unconstitutional judicial orders and won. If you are considering suing us over content on our website, we strongly urge you to instead wait until the search engines have removed the content from their results.

We might update this policy in the future and make no guarantees that we will keep blocked records in place. Further, all removals not pursuant to a court order are at our sole discretion.

This policy is similar to the policies of other major sources of free online court opinions, and we hope that we have struck a reasonable balance between both your interests and the public's interest in your case.

Last Modified: July 23, 2026