{"slug": "courtlistener", "name": "CourtListener", "category": "databases", "category_name": "Databases", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 3, "warners": 0, "score": 2.589, "rising": -0.98, "first": "2025-11-07", "latest": "2026-06-20", "why": "courtlistener is providing a much better service at no cost to the public through donations", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 0, "compare": 0, "warn": 0}, "spark": [1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "courtlistener is providing a much better service at no cost to the public through donations", "kind": "", "icon": false, "domain": "courtlistener.com", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["CourtListener"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 777782624, "item_id": 48611414, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48611414", "by": "awinter-py", "date": "2026-06-20", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "As a user of both courtlistener and pacer, I mostly believe freelaw can deliver a better cheaper equivalent than what exists", "excerpt": "fwiw the US judiciary agrees with you https://www.uscourts.gov/file/62983/download > The judiciary opposes measures that shift the costs of providing access to PACER to litigants filing cases in federal courts, unduly hindering access to justice That's their response to the open courts act of 2021, which would have made pacer free. As a user of both courtlistener and pacer, I mostly believe freelaw can deliver a bett", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Court Records Should Be Free"}, {"id": 777696656, "item_id": 48606041, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48606041", "by": "awinter-py", "date": "2026-06-19", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "courtlistener is providing a much better service at no cost to the public through donations", "excerpt": "this is right if pacer is expensive to operate for a real reason but 1) it has high revenue which 2) is required to go to expenses, which 3) it may not be going to expenses (per freelaw project, at least https://free.law/2016/11/14/pacer-revenue/) courtlistener is providing a much better service at no cost to the public through donations; it's reasonable to say 'govt is required to feed new data to courtlistener and ", "context": "", "use_case": "Free court records access", "switched_from": "", "story": "Court Records Should Be Free"}, {"id": 761242368, "item_id": 47577648, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577648", "by": "esbranson", "date": "2026-03-30", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "CourtListener (from the non-profit Free Law Project) provides bulk access to its case law collection.", "excerpt": "CourtListener (from the non-profit Free Law Project) provides bulk access to its case law collection.[1][2] I expect they are ingesting the GPO uscourts collection so it should have near complete (99%) coverage.[3][4] [1] https://www.courtlistener.com/help/api/ [2] https://www.courtlistener.com/help/coverage/ [3] https://www.govinfo.gov/help/uscourts [4] https://www.courtlistener.com/help/coverage/opinions/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I put all 8,642 Spanish laws in Git \u2013 every reform is a commit"}, {"id": 733539120, "item_id": 45846195, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45846195", "by": "treetalker", "date": "2025-11-07", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Court Listener has been a pretty good recent entry.", "excerpt": "To update Gwern's information on PACER mirrors for federal court documents, Court Listener has been a pretty good recent entry. https://www.courtlistener.com/ Most Florida trial-court filings are available, but plebes must know the court they're in because the clerk's office for each judicial circuit runs its own docket system. Appellate court documents (briefs, motions, records, and other filings, not just opinions)", "context": "", "use_case": "Federal court document search", "switched_from": "", "story": "Internet Search Tips (2023)"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["free court records access", "federal court document search"], "compared": [], "makers": [{"id": 804503200, "item_id": 50281450, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50281450", "by": "toomuchtodo", "date": "2026-10-28", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Most wanted docs are at https://www.courtlistener.com/prayers/top/", "excerpt": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086570 > I'm the director of Free Law Project. For the case mentioned in the article we actually did a full expert testimony figuring out roughly how much per page it'd cost to run PACER using AWS GovCloud and a handful of other assumptions. It was...half a ten thousandth of a penny per page, IIRC: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/52/15/national-veterans-legal-servic", "context": "director of Free Law Project", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Pacer Fees Are Going Up 20%. They Should Be Going Away"}, {"id": 796049232, "item_id": 49753077, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49753077", "by": "mlissner", "date": "2026-09-18", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We have hosted bulk case law at Free Law Project for over a decade", "excerpt": "We have hosted bulk case law at Free Law Project for over a decade: https://wiki.free.law/c/courtlistener/help/api/bulk-data", "context": "", "use_case": "bulk case law data", "switched_from": "", "story": "Astra for Law"}, {"id": 741928401, "item_id": 46370525, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46370525", "by": "mlissner", "date": "2025-12-23", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "the millions of documents we have in CourtListener", "excerpt": "Cool to see this here. It\u2019s funny because we do so many huge, complex, multiyear projects at Free Law Project, but this is the most viral any of our work has ever gone! Anyway, I made X-ray to analyze the millions of documents we have in CourtListener so that we can try to educate people about the issue. The analysis was fun. We used S3 batch jobs to analyze millions of documents in a matter of minutes, but we haven\u2019", "context": "works at Free Law Project", "use_case": "court document archive", "switched_from": "", "story": "X-ray: a Python library for finding bad redactions in PDF documents"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600946", "title": "Court Records Should Be Free", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50281328", "title": "Pacer Fees Are Going Up 20%. They Should Be Going Away", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49745940", "title": "Astra for Law", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47553798", "title": "I put all 8,642 Spanish laws in Git \u2013 every reform is a commit", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46369923", "title": "X-ray: a Python library for finding bad redactions in PDF documents", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45823703", "title": "Internet Search Tips (2023)", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 1}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 0, "family_ref": null, "runs_on": null, "lines": [], "quotes": [{"id": 777782624, "item_id": 48611414, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48611414", "by": "awinter-py", "date": "2026-06-20", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "As a user of both courtlistener and pacer, I mostly believe freelaw can deliver a better cheaper equivalent than what exists", "excerpt": "fwiw the US judiciary agrees with you https://www.uscourts.gov/file/62983/download > The judiciary opposes measures that shift the costs of providing access to PACER to litigants filing cases in federal courts, unduly hindering access to justice That's their response to the open courts act of 2021, which would have made pacer free. As a user of both courtlistener and pacer, I mostly believe freelaw can deliver a bett", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Court Records Should Be Free"}, {"id": 777696656, "item_id": 48606041, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48606041", "by": "awinter-py", "date": "2026-06-19", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "courtlistener is providing a much better service at no cost to the public through donations", "excerpt": "this is right if pacer is expensive to operate for a real reason but 1) it has high revenue which 2) is required to go to expenses, which 3) it may not be going to expenses (per freelaw project, at least https://free.law/2016/11/14/pacer-revenue/) courtlistener is providing a much better service at no cost to the public through donations; it's reasonable to say 'govt is required to feed new data to courtlistener and ", "context": "", "use_case": "Free court records access", "switched_from": "", "story": "Court Records Should Be Free"}, {"id": 761242368, "item_id": 47577648, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577648", "by": "esbranson", "date": "2026-03-30", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "CourtListener (from the non-profit Free Law Project) provides bulk access to its case law collection.", "excerpt": "CourtListener (from the non-profit Free Law Project) provides bulk access to its case law collection.[1][2] I expect they are ingesting the GPO uscourts collection so it should have near complete (99%) coverage.[3][4] [1] https://www.courtlistener.com/help/api/ [2] https://www.courtlistener.com/help/coverage/ [3] https://www.govinfo.gov/help/uscourts [4] https://www.courtlistener.com/help/coverage/opinions/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I put all 8,642 Spanish laws in Git \u2013 every reform is a commit"}, {"id": 733539120, "item_id": 45846195, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45846195", "by": "treetalker", "date": "2025-11-07", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Court Listener has been a pretty good recent entry.", "excerpt": "To update Gwern's information on PACER mirrors for federal court documents, Court Listener has been a pretty good recent entry. https://www.courtlistener.com/ Most Florida trial-court filings are available, but plebes must know the court they're in because the clerk's office for each judicial circuit runs its own docket system. Appellate court documents (briefs, motions, records, and other filings, not just opinions)", "context": "", "use_case": "Federal court document search", "switched_from": "", "story": "Internet Search Tips (2023)"}]}