CourtListener.com Terms of Service and Policies

Terms of Service

Free Law Project is the non-profit 501(c)(3) operator of CourtListener and other projects that fall under the CourtListener name, which we refer to below as the Services:

the website at courtlistener.com;
the CourtListener REST API and the webhooks it can send;
the CourtListener MCP server at mcp.courtlistener.com; and
the accounts, alerts, and membership features that support all of the above.

By accessing, browsing, or using the Services, you agree the following terms:

We are not your lawyers

Our Services, are not intended to be or to provide legal advice. Any information supplied by the Services or their operators is intended solely as general guidance on the use of the Services, and does not constitute professional or legal advice.

If you reach our data through an AI client connected to our MCP server, the answer you read is that client's output, not ours. It may summarize, paraphrase, omit, or misstate the underlying record even when the record itself is accurate. Verify anything you rely on against the primary source.

The Services may be unreliable and might simply go away

We've been here since 2010, but Free Law Project shall not be responsible for any delays or interruptions of, or errors or omissions contained in, the Services. At our sole discrection and without prior notice or liability, we may discontinue or alter any aspect of the Services, including, but not limited to: (i) restricting the time or scope of availability, (ii) restricting the amount of use permitted.

The documents on this site may be unreliably reproduced

Free Law Project makes no representations, warranties or covenants regarding, and does not guarantee, the truthfulness, accuracy, relevancy, or reliability of any information or other material that are communicated through, or posted to, the Services. You acknowledge that any reliance on information or other material communicated through, or posted to, the Services will be at your own risk.

Usage Restrictions

You will not use, intentionally or unintentionally, the Services or any information derived therefrom in violation of any applicable international, national, federal, state, or local law.

You are prohibited from uploading copyrighted content that does not fall under a fair use exception, as explained under our Copyright Policy. You represent and warrant that you have the legal right to submit any content you upload to the Services, including content automatically submitted through our APIs or the RECAP extension. You acknowledge that while judicial opinions, motions, and other filings are generally in the public domain, other court filings may contain third-party copyrighted works, such as books and articles, that may retain copyright protection. You are solely responsible for ensuring that your submissions do not infringe copyrights.

You understand that Free Law Project is not a consumer reporting agency under the Fair Credit Reporting Act ("FCRA") and therefore you agree that you will not use Courtlistener.com and any information derived therefrom: (1) as a factor in establishing an individual's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, government benefits, housing, or any other FCRA purpose as specified in 15 U.S.C. § 1681b(a); (2) to generate a "consumer report" as that term is defined under FCRA, 15 U.S.C. § 1681a(d); and (3) in any manner that could result in Free Law becoming subject to FCRA. You are prohibited from using the Services and any information derived therefrom in any unauthorized manner and in furtherance of criminal or illegal activities.

Automated and Agentic Access

If you connect an AI assistant, agent, or other automated client to the Services:

You are responsible for its requests. Calls made with your credentials are treated as yours, including calls an agent makes without your specific instruction. Review what your client is about to do before you authorize tools that change your account, such as those that create or delete alerts.
Keep credentials to yourself. Do not share, resell, pool, or transfer your account credentials, API tokens, or OAuth access tokens. If you need access for a product or a team, talk to us about a commercial agreement.
Respect the limits. Do not use multiple accounts, registered clients, or credential rotation to exceed the rate limits that apply to your access level.
Attribute honestly. If you republish or display our data, do not present it in a way that suggests Free Law Project produced, endorsed, or verified an AI-generated analysis of it.

Disclaimer of Warranty

You agree that use of the Services is entirely at your own risk. The Services are provided "as is," without warranty of any kind whatsoever, either express or implied, to you or any other person relating in any way to the Services, including any part thereof, or any Web site or other content or services that may be accessible directly or indirectly through the Services. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, Free Law Project disclaims to the maximum extent permitted by law any and all (i) warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose, (ii) warranties against infringement of any third party intellectual property or proprietary rights, (iii) warranties relating to delays, interruptions, errors or omissions in the Services, or any party thereof, (iv) warranties relating to the transmission or delivery of the Services, and (v) warranties otherwise related to performance, nonperformance, or other acts or omissions by Free Law Project or any third party.

Limitations of Liability

This disclaimer of liability applies to any damages or injury caused by any failure or performance, error, omission, interruption, deletion, defect, delay in operation or transmission, computer virus, communication line failure, theft or destruction or unauthorized access to, alteration of, or use of record, whether for breach of contract, tortious behavior, negligence, or under any other cause of action. You specifically acknowledge that the risk of injury from the foregoing rests entirely with you. Neither Free Law Project nor any of its partners, agents, executives, directors, employees or affiliates shall be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages whatsoever arising out of use of the Services or inability to again access to or use the Services or out of any breach of any warranty. You hereby acknowledge that the provisions of this section shall apply to all content in the Services.

Governing Law and Jurisdiction

These Terms are governed by and shall be construed in accordance with the laws of the State of California. Any action arising out of or relating to these terms shall be filed only in state or federal courts located in California, and you agree to submit to the personal jurisdiction of such courts for the purpose of litigating any such action.

End of terms.

Last modified: August 5, 2026

Privacy Policy

Free Law Project does not sell information collected about your use of the Services and will only share such information in the ways explained in this policy.

What we collect

From visitors who browse without creating an account, we collect:

Device and network data, which is processed transiently to operate and protect the Services: Your IP address (for content delivery, rate-limiting, and abuse prevention) and limited technical signals from your browser are used by our analytics and anti-crawling challenge. We do not build advertising profiles or use cross-site tracking cookies.
Aggregate, de-identified usage statistics, which may be gathered to identify which pages are popular and how the site is being used.

From users who register an account we may additionally collect:

Account identifiers and profile information: username, CourtListener user ID, email address, your first and last name, employer, postal address, and bar membership information, if you provide it.
Authentication credentials: a securely hashed password, email-activation tokens, and any API tokens or OAuth application credentials you create.
Content you create in your account: saved search alerts (including the search terms you save), docket alerts, notes and bookmarks tags, document "prayer" requests, and visualizations.
Your search history: the search queries you run while signed in, including searches your AI assistant runs on your behalf through the MCP server.
Copies of the emails we send you are temporarily retained so we can support and troubleshoot delivery.

From users who connect an AI assistant or agent to our MCP server, we additionally collect:

Short-lived session state: so that paging and long citation-analysis jobs survive across tool calls, we hold pagination cursors and in-progress jobs in a temporary store, keyed by a keyed hash of your account identifier rather than by your name, email, or token.
Tool inputs: the parameters your client sends when it calls a tool — search queries, filters, endpoint parameters, alert definitions, and any text you ask us to extract or verify citations from. If you paste a brief, memo, or set of notes into your AI assistant and ask it to check the citations, that text is transmitted to our server to be processed. We do not retain it once we have answered, apart from the short-lived job state described above, though it may appear in an error report if a request fails.
Request metadata: timestamps, the tool called, the response status, and the IP address the request arrived from. If you use a hosted AI assistant, that address usually belongs to your provider's infrastructure rather than to your own computer, so it tells us more about your provider than about you.
Client-reported technical signals: the client name and version and the MCP protocol version your software reports.

From donors and members, we may collect the above account and contact data, plus:

Donation history: the amount, date, one-time or recurring status, and a payment-processor-issued reference or customer token.
Membership data: your membership level, status, and term dates.

We do not collect or store your payment card or bank-account details. All payments are handled by our third-party payment provider, Neon One, LLC; we never see or retain your full card number. We keep only a record of your donation history and a processor-issued token that lets us reconcile a gift or bill a recurring donation without holding payment credentials.

How we use collected information

We use personal data about users, visitors, and donors to:

Provide and secure the Services: maintain and authenticate your account, validate access tokens and honor the scopes you approved, keep short-lived session state for agentic clients, deliver the features you request, and defend the Services against attacks, abuse, and automated scraping.
Communicate with you: send transactional email, manage its deliverability, and respond to your support requests.
Operate and improve our systems: identify popular pages, diagnose technical problems, and enhance our systems. We may analyze anonymized information such as notes, bookmarks, or search history to improve our search algorithms and user experience and to understand how the system is used.
Process financial support: complete and reconcile donations, issue receipts and acknowledgments, manage recurring donations and memberships, grant membership benefits (for example, increased API limits), and communicate with you about your support.
Meet legal obligations: retain financial and tax records as required by law.

Please contact us if you have any complaints or concerns about our privacy policy, or notify the FTC through reportfraud.ftc.gov.

We share personal data only with service providers acting on our behalf, with recipients you direct us to, and with researchers in anonymized form:

Amazon Web Services, for hosting, file storage, content delivery (CDN), and transactional email delivery.
Plausible Analytics, used to collect de-identified information from your computer so that we can identify traffic patterns on the website.
Zoho, our customer-relationship and support-ticketing systems, is used to manage our relationship with you and respond to your requests.
Neon One, LLC, used to process transactions, handle donations, and manage donors; receives donor name, email, and postal address to process donations and steward members.
Sentry, Inc., for error tracking and logging. This information generally does not contain any personal information and is purged after 90 days.
Academic researchers, who may receive anonymized information only, and who may publish research or improve our systems based on that information.
Recipients you choose, in connection with any webhook endpoint you configure, any third-party application you authorize through our OAuth interface, and any AI assistant or agent you connect to our MCP server (each of which receives only the data covered by the scope you approve).

We do not sell your personal data or share it for others' marketing, and we do not share your account contact details (such as your email or address) with researchers or the public.

AI assistants, agents, and your AI provider

When you connect an AI assistant to our MCP server, you are choosing to route data through software we do not operate. Two things follow from that.

Everything a tool returns goes to that assistant. Search results, opinion and docket text, judge records, financial disclosures, and citation-analysis output are delivered to the client you authorized and, if that client is hosted, to the company that runs it and is subject to that company's privacy policies.

What you send us passes through them first. Anything that reaches our Service reaches us only after your AI provider has processed it and is subject to that AI provider's privacy policy.

We are not affiliated with and do not endorse any particular AI client, model, or provider, and connecting one does not make it our service provider or our agent. Before you send confidential, privileged, or client-identifying material through an AI assistant — including for citation checking — review your provider's data-handling terms and your own professional and ethical obligations.

How long we keep collected information

Search queries and usage logs are deleted automatically when they are 12 weeks old.
IP-address-to-user mappings used for operational security are kept for 14 days. Short-lived analytics and rate-limiting caches expire within days.
Webhook events are kept for 90 days.
Unconfirmed accounts that are never used are removed after 60 days.
Account information, saved alerts, notes, tags, and similar content are kept until you delete them or delete your account.
Copies of emails we send to you are kept for 30 days and email deliverability records such as bounce and complaint flags are kept indefinitely for security, to protect our sending reputation, and to avoid sending messages to users that do not want them.
Donation and membership records are retained as financial records for as long as required for accounting, audit, and tax purposes, including after you close your account.

When you delete your account, we remove your user content and anonymize the remaining account record. Any recurring donation is stopped, and donation records are disassociated from your account to the extent we can while meeting our record-keeping obligations.

Your choices and controls

From your account settings you can delete your account or request an export of your data at any time.

General terms

Attribution: If you connect an AI assistant, agent, or other software to the Services, you agree to these policies both on your own behalf and with respect to that software, and you remain responsible for what it does using your credentials.
No sale of personal data: we do not sell your personal data or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.
Changes: we may update this policy; we will post the revised version here with a new "last modified" date. Prior versions are available.
Contact: if you have questions, requests, or complaints about this policy or your personal data, please use our contact page.

Last modified: July 29, 2026

Copyright Policy

Free Law Project follows the notice and takedown procedures in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), 17 U.S.C. Section 512.

If you believe content on the Services violates your copyright, please immediately notify its operators by sending a message with the information described below through the contact page. If Free Law Project acts in response to an infringement notice, they will make a good-faith attempt to contact the person who contributed the content using the most recent email address that person provided to the Services.

Under the DMCA, you may be held liable for damages based on material misrepresentations in your infringement notice. You must also make a good-faith evaluation of whether the use of your content is a fair use, because fair uses are not infringing. See 17 U.S.C. Section 107 and Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., No. 13-16106 (9th Cir. Sep. 14, 2015). If you are not sure if the content you want to report infringes your copyright, you should first contact a lawyer.

The DMCA requires that all infringement notices must include all of the following:

A signature of the copyright owner or a person authorized to act on the copyright owner's behalf
An identification of the copyright claimed to have been infringed
A description of the nature and location of the material that you claim to infringe your copyright, in sufficient detail to allow Free Law Project to find and positively identify that material
Your name, address, telephone number, and email address
A statement that you believe in good faith that the use of the material that you claim to infringe your copyright is not authorized by law, or by the copyright owner or such owner's agent
A statement, under penalty of perjury, that all of the information contained in your infringement notice is accurate
A statement, under penalty of perjury, that you are either the copyright owner or a person authorized to act on their behalf.

Free Law Project will respond to all DMCA-compliant infringement notices, including, as required or appropriate, by removing the offending material or disabling all links to it.

It is also the policy of CourtListener.com, in appropriate circumstances and in our sole discretion, to suspend or terminate the accounts of users who are repeat copyright infringers, as defined in this section.

All received infringement notices may be posted in full to the Lumen database.

Updated: August 5, 2026