CourtListener Legal Cases Scraper ⚖️

Scrape US court opinions, dockets and RECAP documents from CourtListener — the free legal-research database from the Free Law Project. Get structured case data (case name, court, date filed, citations, docket number, judge, status, snippet) for legal research, case-law monitoring, litigation intelligence and compliance workflows.

No API key. No login. Clean JSON. Cheap.

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💡 What it does

This actor queries the public CourtListener REST API (v4) with your full-text search terms, follows cursor pagination, and returns one clean, flat record per case/document. It runs on the free unauthenticated endpoint with polite rate-limiting — so it stays cheap and datacenter-friendly.

✨ Features

• 🔍 Full-text search across millions of US court opinions and federal filings
• 📚 Four result types: case-law opinions (o), RECAP filings (r), RECAP documents (rd), dockets (d)
• 📄 Cursor pagination — pulls up to 1,000 items per run across multiple queries
• 🧹 Clean output — HTML-stripped snippets, ISO dates, absolute URLs, citation arrays
• 🔑 No API key required
• ⚡ Lightweight (512 MB), fast, and inexpensive to run

📥 Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	select	Scraping mode (search).
queries	array	Full-text queries (case names, topics, parties, citations). Prefilled with ["copyright infringement","first amendment"].
type	select	o opinions · r RECAP filings · rd RECAP documents · d dockets. Default o.
maxItems	integer	Max results across all queries (1–1000). Default 100.

Example input

{
  "mode": "search",
  "queries": ["copyright infringement", "trademark dilution"],
  "type": "o",
  "maxItems": 200
}

📤 Output

Each item:

{
  "case_name": "In re \"The Exorcist\" Copyright Infringement Litigation",
  "court": "United States Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation",
  "court_id": "jpml",
  "date_filed": "1976-04-22",
  "citations": ["411 F. Supp. 793", "1976 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 15456"],
  "docket_number": "MDL No. 246",
  "judge": null,
  "status": "Published",
  "snippet": "This copyright case concerns ...",
  "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/8849630/in-re-the-exorcist-copyright-infringement-litigation/",
  "cluster_id": 8849630,
  "type": "o",
  "source": "courtlistener",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-20T12:00:00+00:00"
}

🎯 Use cases

• Legal research — find relevant opinions and precedent by topic, party or citation
• Case-law monitoring — track new decisions on issues that matter to your practice
• Litigation intelligence — map dockets, judges and courts across a topic
• Compliance — watch regulatory and enforcement litigation over time

💰 Pricing

Roughly $0.5 per 1,000 results on top of Apify platform usage — one of the cheapest ways to get structured US case-law data at scale.

🔗 Related actors

• SEC EDGAR Scraper
• Federal Register Scraper
• GLEIF Scraper
• OFAC Sanctions Scraper

🏷️ Keywords

courtlistener, legal cases scraper, court opinions, case law, us courts, dockets, recap, pacer, legal research, litigation intelligence, case law monitoring, judicial opinions, citations, free law project, legal data api, compliance monitoring

⚖️ Legal & data

Data is sourced from CourtListener / the Free Law Project public API, which publishes US court records that are in the public domain. Use responsibly and in accordance with CourtListener's terms. This actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Free Law Project.