Tools

14 tools spanning the full CourtListener dataset — opinion search and retrieval, citation network traversal, federal docket lookup, party and attorney lookup, judge biography, judicial financial disclosure search and detail, court discovery, and oral argument search and detail:

courtlistener_search_opinions

Search the 9M+ opinion corpus. Returns opinion cluster summaries with matched text excerpts.

• Free-text queries with field syntax: caseName:, court_id:, judge:, docketNumber:, cites:(id), boolean AND / OR / NOT
• Filter by court ID, date range, publication status (Published / Unpublished / In-chambers, etc.)
• Sort by relevance score, filing date (asc/desc), or citation count
• Cursor-based pagination; up to 20 results per call
• Results include cluster_id (for courtlistener_get_opinion) and docket_id (for courtlistener_get_docket) for chaining
• Each cluster carries its opinions[] variants — per-variant opinion ID, type, author, outbound cites, and a CourtListener-hosted local_path copy of the source document
• snippet is the matched excerpt from the first variant that carries one; CourtListener does not mark which variant the search matched

courtlistener_get_opinion

Fetch full text and metadata for an opinion cluster.

• A cluster groups all opinions filed in a case: majority, concurrence, dissent, per curiam
• Returns html_text and plain_text for each opinion variant; surfaces download_url when local text is absent
• Each variant carries type_label — the same value courtlistener_search_opinions reports (lead-opinion, concurrence-opinion, dissent) — beside the stored type code, whose numeric prefix is a sort key
• Includes cites[] (outbound citation IDs), cite_count, syllabus, posture, and docket link
• Three upstream requests — the cluster, its opinion variants, and the linked docket for court and docket number — kept within the tight free-tier rate limit

courtlistener_get_citations

Retrieve the citation network for an opinion cluster in either direction.

• cited_by (default): opinions that cite this one — measures precedential influence and downstream adoption
• citing: opinions this one cites — reveals the authority chain the court relied on
• Optional court and date filters; up to 20 results per call
• Pagination differs by direction: cited_by follows CourtListener's own cursor with the filters applied, so its total and its pages describe the same set; citing walks the cited-opinion list and filters each page as it goes, so a filtered page can come back empty with matches still ahead — the response distinguishes that from an exhausted network
• Results include snippet, the matched excerpt from the related opinion — a relevance preview for the cluster, not necessarily the text surrounding the citation
• Rate-limit note: three upstream requests per call in either direction; the free tier supports 1–2 hops on a single case, and deep multi-hop traversal exhausts the daily budget quickly

courtlistener_lookup_citation

Resolve legal citations to opinion cluster IDs.

• Accepts standard reporter formats: "410 U.S. 113", "347 U.S. 483", "93 S. Ct. 705"
• Returns matches, one entry per citation CourtListener extracted from the input — pass a passage and every citation in it resolves, each with its own status (200 one case, 300 several candidates, 400 unrecognized reporter, 404 no match) and decoded status_label
• Each match carries the cases it resolved to: cluster_id, case_name, court / court_id, court_resolution, docket_id, date_filed, all known citation strings, cite_count, precedential_status, and judges
• An unresolved or ambiguous citation comes back inside matches, not as an error — only text carrying no parseable citation at all fails
• court is absent from the citation-lookup payload (the court lives on the linked docket), so it is resolved from docket_id — one extra request per distinct docket, bounded by max_court_lookups (default 4, up to 20; 0 skips court resolution). court_resolution (resolved / no_docket / lookup_failed / over_budget) says why a court is or isn't populated — only over_budget is worth retrying with a larger budget
• One upstream POST to /citation-lookup/ plus those court lookups, issued sequentially and stopped early on the first rate-limited response. The endpoint requires authentication and has no unauthenticated path

courtlistener_search_dockets

Search RECAP federal court dockets.

• Query matched against case name, docket number, party names, and attorney names
• party_name filter applies in addition to (AND with) the q query — more precise than embedding party names in the query
• Returns the docket's parties, attorneys, and firms, plus nature of suit, jurisdiction type, and the referred magistrate judge
• Returns up to 3 sample document entries per docket — a search excerpt, not the full filing list — each with is_available status, page count, and a fully-qualified RECAP storage URL when a copy is stored
• coverage_note in every response — RECAP is crowd-sourced from PACER; completeness varies by court

courtlistener_get_docket

Fetch full docket metadata and entry list for a single federal case.