CourtListener.com Terms of Service and Policies

Terms of Service

By accessing, browsing, or using CourtListener.com, you agree the following terms:

We are not your lawyers

CourtListener.com is not intended to be or to provide legal advice. Any information supplied by CourtListener.com or its operators is intended solely as general guidance on the use of the service, and does not constitute professional or legal advice.

The service may be unreliable and might simply go away

We've been here since 2010, but CourtListener.com and Free Law Project shall not be responsible for any delays or interruptions of, or errors or omissions contained in, the service. CourtListener.com may discontinue or alter any aspect of this service, including, but not limited to: (i) restricting the time of availability, (ii) restricting the availability and/or scope of the service, (iii) restricting the amount of use permitted, at CourtListener.com's sole discretion and without prior notice or liability.

The documents on this site may be unreliably reproduced

CourtListener.com 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 service. You acknowledge that any reliance on information or other material communicated through, or posted to, the service will be at your own risk.

Usage Restrictions

You will not use, intentionally or unintentionally, Courtlistener.com or any information derived therefrom in violation of any applicable international, national, federal, state, or local law. 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 Service and any information derived therefrom in any unauthorized manner and in furtherance of criminal or illegal activities.

Disclaimer of Warranty

You agree that use of the service is entirely at your own risk. The service is 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 service, including any part thereof, or any Web site or other content or service that may be accessible directly or indirectly through the service. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, CourtListener.com 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 service, or any party thereof, (iv) warranties relating to the transmission or delivery of the service, and (v) warranties otherwise related to performance, nonperformance, or other acts or omissions by CourtListener.com 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 CourtListener.com 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 this service or inability to again access to or use this service or out of any breach of any warranty. You hereby acknowledge that the provisions of this section shall apply to all content on Courtlistener.com.

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: June 11, 2020

Privacy Policy

CourtListener does not sell information collected about your visits to this site or usage of this site 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 service: 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.
Copies of the emails we send you are temporarily retained so we can support and troubleshoot delivery.

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 service: maintain and authenticate your account, deliver the features you request, and defend the service 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 via their online Complaint Assistant.

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, and any third-party application you authorize through our OAuth interface (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.

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.
Email deliverability records such as bounce and complaint flags are kept 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

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 24 2026

Copyright Policy

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

If you believe content on CourtListener.com violates your copyright, please immediately notify its operators by sending a message with the information described below through the contact page. If CourtListener.com's operators act 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 CourtListener.com.

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 CourtListener.com 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.

Repeat infringers of this copyright policy will have their accounts terminated.

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

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

Updated: July 24, 2026