Free Online Research Tools: CourtListener

CourtListener is part of the Free Law Project, a non-profit dedicated to providing free access to primary legal materials, developing legal research tools, and supporting academic legal research. CourtListener contains all of the court opinions collected by Free Law Project, legal research tools, and bulk downloading for academic purposes. The repository also includes the RECAP Archive of court dockets and documents highlighted in last Thursday’s post.

The Opinions database offers advanced options, and a basic citator showing which cases have cited to your case and the authorities cited by your case. However, there are no treatment signals like those on Westlaw or Lexis. Check out the coverage page to see if your jurisdiction is included in the database, and what date ranges are covered.

CourtListener features data visualizations created by users that map legal issues and relationships between court opinions. CourtListener is also building an oral argument collection, with the option for users to download and create podcasts. Users may create a free account to save favorites and create alerts.

Looking for more free and low-cost legal research tools? Check out our Research Guide.