Free Case Law and Legal Databases

  • Judyrecords.com is a 100% free nationwide search engine that lets you instantly search hundreds of millions of United States court cases and lawsuits. judyrecords has over 100x more cases than Google Scholar and 10x more cases than PACER, the official case management system of the United States federal judiciary.
  • Caselaw Access Project – Free. 1.7 million+ federal cases. 4.9 million+ state cases.CAP includes all official, book-published United States case law — every volume designated as an official report of decisions by a court within the United States. Cases years range from 1658 to 2018.
  • CourtListener – Free. 4 million+ federal and state court opinions. 70K+ oral arguments. 38K+ hours of oral argument audio.Primarily focused on federal courts, state courts of last resort, and state appellate courts. CourtListener features advanced search capability, alerts for new opinions matching any search criteria, and ranking of search results that takes into account the authority of opinions based on citation and precedence factors. Individual opinion pages are richly cross-referenced to related case law. PACER notwithstanding, CourtListener is the most powerful case law research tool available online — and in many ways is much more powerful.
  • Fastcase Docket Alarm – Several free searches granted. Premium access upsell. 26 million+ federal cases. 91 million+ state cases. 19 million+ specialized agency cases (patent, trademark, tax, international trade, etc.). In addition to case tracking/alerts, Fastcase’s Docket Alarm includes advanced analytics and calendaring capabilities.
  • Google Scholar Case Law – Free. Google doesn’t provide the exact number of court cases. Being focused on federal courts, state courts of last resort, and state appellate courts, Google’s case law database is highly likely to be roughly the same size of CourtListener’s case law database of 4-5 million cases. Google’s Case Law search is extremely fast to search and navigate, has a very clean user interface, supports Google’s standard query operators, and allows the creation of alerts for new results that match a given search.
  • PACER – Fee-based, unless usage is less than $30 within a quarter or you are an exempted group or individual. 56 million+ federal court cases, including bankruptcy, criminal, civil, and appellate.PACER is the official case management system of the United States federal judiciary, run by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AOUSC). Fees are charged for almost every kind of request for case info, including each search result page viewed, and even when a search returns no results.
  • UniCourt – Several free searches granted. Premium access upsell. 8 million+ federal cases. 110 million+ state cases.UniCourt offers premium API-based access to legal data and case tracking/alerts for the cases in its database and any case available in PACER. A large selling point of UniCourt’s solutions is that they use powerful data normalization processes and algorithms to add value to their legal data, which includes normalization of case classification and entity names (e.g., people, companies, attorneys, law firms, judges).

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