Court Records & Legal Data

US court records are nominally public but practically locked behind PACER's per-page fees. The Free Law Project has spent fifteen years tunneling through that wall with FOSS. Pair with Civic Tech Overview, FOIA, Investigative Journalism, and Civic Organizations.

Free / FOSS (start here)

• ★ ★ CourtListener — free; AGPL FOSS code on GitHub; Free Law Project non-profit. Federal + state appellate case law, oral arguments, judges, and (via RECAP) PACER docket data. The default starting point for any US-court-data work. API + bulk data dumps. The single most-important free legal-data resource in the US.
• ★ ★ RECAP — free; AGPL; Free Law Project; the browser extension that uploads PACER documents to a free public archive every time a paying user fetches them. Has built up tens of millions of free PACER documents over its lifetime. Chrome / Firefox / Edge.
• ★ Justia — free; large free-access US case-law site; ad-supported; less FOSS-shaped but a useful no-account starting point.
• ★ Caselaw Access Project (CAP) — free; Harvard Law School Library; all US federal + state published case law through 2018 digitized + open-licensed. The bulk-data underpinning of most modern legal search.
• ★ Public.Resource.org — non-profit; Carl Malamud's project; pushes statutes, regulations, and court records into the public domain. Free. The OG civic-records-liberation org.
• Google Scholar (legal opinions) — free; not FOSS but no-cost; full-text search of federal + state cases.

Paid (the legal-research duopoly)

• Westlaw (Thomson Reuters) — paid; the industry-standard legal-research platform; ~$200+/month minimum; expensive.
• LexisNexis — paid; the other half of the duopoly; comparable pricing.
• Bloomberg Law — paid; finance-leaning legal research.
• Fastcase / vLex — paid; cheaper Westlaw-alternatives; bar-association bundles.

PACER and the federal-court paywall

• PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) — federal courts; paid ($0.10/page, capped at $3/document); revenue-generating from the public. The most-criticized fee structure in US public-records law.
• ★ ★ RECAP Archive — see above; the public-domain shadow of PACER built one document at a time.
• CourtListener "Get Documents on Demand" — pay once, the document goes into the public archive forever; the way to use PACER ethically.
• Big-document litigation (e.g., Trump cases, FTX bankruptcy) — usually fully RECAP'd; check there before paying.

State courts

State court data is wildly inconsistent:

• ★ CourtListener — covers state appellate; trial-court coverage is patchy.
• OpenStates court data — see Elections Data; growing but partial.
• Each state has its own portal (PA's UJS, NY's NYSCEF, CA's online services) — most charge fees, most are not bulk-downloadable, none speak a common API.
• Trellis — paid; aggregates state-court trial-court data; the most comprehensive private aggregator.

Statutes & regulations (free)

• ★ ★ Cornell Legal Information Institute (LII) — free; US Code + CFR + Constitution + state codes; the canonical free-access reference.
• ★ Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) — free; ecfr.gov; federal regs in HTML.
• ★ Federal Register — free; federalregister.gov; daily federal regulatory publication.
• Public.Resource.org Statutes — free; older statutes, technical standards.
• OpenLaws (EU equivalent ecosystem) — free; varying maturity.

Judge / court analytics

• ★ CourtListener Judges — free; judge biographies, financial disclosures, recusal patterns.
• Lex Machina (LexisNexis) — paid; case-prediction analytics for civil litigation.
• Premonition — paid; judge-analytics; controversial.
• Ravel Law (acquired by LexisNexis) — paid; judge analytics.

Honest take (2026)

• Free Law Project's CourtListener + RECAP is one of the most important sustained civic-tech wins. Two decades of patient work; a FOSS codebase; tens of millions of free public documents. Donate.
• PACER is overdue for legislative reform. The "Open Courts Act" has been re-introduced repeatedly; passage would obsolete RECAP. As of 2026 it has not passed.
• State trial-court data is the next big civic-tech frontier. Trellis / Bloomberg / LexisNexis are aggregating it commercially; there's no FOSS equivalent yet — opportunity for a 2027+ project.
• Westlaw / LexisNexis remain dominant in actual practice because of their head-note + key-numbering systems, not because the case law itself is locked. Free-access tools cover 95% of "find the case" workflow but not 90% of "structured legal research."

Pick this if…

• Free federal case-law search: CourtListener or Caselaw Access Project.
• Federal court dockets / PACER documents: check RECAP first; pay-and-archive via CourtListener if missing.
• Statutes / regulations: Cornell LII or eCFR.
• You're a journalist tracking a federal case: CourtListener docket alerts (free).
• You're a lawyer with a Westlaw subscription: keep Westlaw for headnotes, but install RECAP to feed the commons.
• State trial-court records: the state's portal + Trellis (paid) — be patient; the FOSS layer is incomplete.
• You want to support this work: donate to Free Law Project.