CourtListener: The Free Legal Database Every Attorney Should Know

CourtListener is a free, open-access legal database operated by Free Law Project, a non-profit organization. It contains millions of judicial opinions covering all federal courts, many state courts, and oral argument audio. For attorneys who need to verify citations without a Westlaw or LexisNexis subscription, it is the most comprehensive free option available.

The database is built from multiple sources: the RECAP Archive (a crowdsourced collection of PACER documents), direct court feeds, and historical digitization projects. Coverage of federal appellate and Supreme Court opinions is essentially complete. District court coverage varies but is growing steadily.

For citation verification, CourtListener offers a citation-lookup API that accepts a volume, reporter, and page number and returns the matching opinion if it exists. This is the same API that Certavi uses for its verification engine. The response includes the case name, court, date, and a link to the full opinion text.

The practical limitation of CourtListener is state court coverage. While it has significant state case law, it does not have the comprehensive state coverage of Westlaw or LexisNexis. For briefs filed in state courts, attorneys may need to supplement CourtListener with a commercial database.

CourtListener also offers RECAP, a browser extension that automatically uploads PACER documents you access to the public archive. Every document you download from PACER through RECAP becomes freely available to other researchers. It is a practical way to contribute to the legal commons while doing your normal work.

For Certavi users, CourtListener is the default verification source included with every plan. Attorneys who also have Westlaw or LexisNexis accounts can connect them in Settings to verify against multiple databases in priority order.