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Welcome to the Caselaw Access Project Documentation. Here you'll find some documentation about our project, organization, data, and site.

Accessing CAP data via CourtListener

The independent non-profit organization Free Law Project has made the CAP data available through their CourtListener platform. Since both CourtListener and our project are open source projects supported by small teams, we have decided to collaborate to provide the best possible access to the data.

CourtListener provides a robust API for accessing CAP data, as well as a user-friendly interface for searching and browsing the data. To access CAP data via CourtListener, visit the CourtListener homepage to search individual cases, or visit the CourtListener API documentation to access their API.

Accessing CAP cases on our site

The CAP website offers a basic interface for interacting with the cases in our repository. To access reporters by jurisdiction, visit our Caselaw page and select the jurisdiction of interest. The reporters included in that jurisdiction will be listed there.

To access volumes by reporter, select the reporter from the Caselaw page to view the volumes within that reporter.

To access individual cases, first select jurisdiction, then reporter, and finally the volume of interest. Once on the individual volume page, you will be able to access all of the cases in that volume.

See our About page for more details on the materials included.

Bulk Downloads

Downloading

You can download bulk data from our website at https://static.case.law/. You can also browse our Caselaw page and find links to the relevant static download files from there.

An alternative way to access downloads is to use wget, which retries when it encounters a network problem. For example: 

wget https://static.case.law/ark/14.zip

static.case.law file types

Our static file export provides access to the following file types:

  • ReportersMetadata.json: JSON list of metadata for all reporters
  • VolumesMetadata.json: JSON list of metadata for all volumes
  • JurisdictionsMetadata.json: JSON list of metadata for all jurisdictions
  • <reporter slug>/: folder for each reporter
    • ReporterMetadata.json: JSON object of metadata for this reporter
    • VolumesMetadata.json: JSON list of metadata for volumes in this reporter
    • <volume number>/: folder for each volume in this reporter
      • VolumeMetadata.json: JSON object of metadata for this volume
      • CasesMetadata.json: JSON list of metadata for each case in this volume
      • cases/: folder of case JSON files
        • <zero-padded page number>-<zero-padded index number>.json: JSON object with case metadata and text of each section of the case
      • html/:
        • <zero-padded page number>-<zero-padded index number>.html: HTML of each case. Each block of the HTML also contains the region of the PDF from which it was extracted.
    • <volume number>.zip: zip file for each volume folder, including json and html but not PDF. In the zip file, VolumeMetadata.json and CasesMetadata.json are included within a "metadata" subfolder instead of at the root level.
    • <volume number>.pdf: PDF of scanned volume, including selectable OCR.
    • <volume number>.tar: Included for historical interest. Tar file of the volume as originally delivered from the processing vendor.
    • <volume number>.tar.csv: Included for historical interest. Listing of files in <volume number>.tar.
    • <volume number>.tar.sha256: Included for historical interest. Hash of <volume number>.tar.