US federal court records API (CourtListener)

What you get

• Federal dockets (RECAP) or court opinions matching a party or case name
• Case name, docket number, court id and filing date
• A cleaned search snippet (null when too short to be useful) and a link to the CourtListener docket or opinion page (null if none can be built)

Parameters

• qstringrequiredquery

  Party or case name

  2–200 characters

• typedockets | opinionsoptionalquery

  RECAP dockets or court opinions

  default dockets

• courtstringoptionalquery

  CourtListener court id, e.g. nysd

  up to 20 characters

• limitintegeroptionalquery

  Maximum number of results

  1 to 20 · default 10

Try it

curl "https://402check.com/v1/us/court?q=patent+infringement"

Example response

[
  {
    "id": "4214664",
    "caseName": "Doe v. Acme Corp.",
    "docketNumber": "1:16-cv-01234",
    "court": "nysd",
    "dateFiled": "2016-03-01",
    "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/doe-v-acme-corp/",
    "snippet": "Motion to dismiss the complaint"
  }
]

First of 4 results our test fixture returns.

HTTP

curl "https://402check.com/v1/us/court?q=patent+infringement"

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer rk_YOUR_KEY" "https://402check.com/v1/us/court?q=patent+infringement"

MCP

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": 1,
  "method": "tools/call",
  "params": {
    "name": "us_court",
    "arguments": {
      "q": "patent infringement"
    }
  }
}

Endpoint https://402check.com/mcp. Setup for Cursor, Claude and other clients is in the docs.

Source and limits

Data from CourtListener (Free Law Project).

• Federal courts only; no state courts
• At most 20 results per call; filter by court id (e.g. nysd) to narrow
• Coverage of RECAP dockets depends on what has been uploaded to the RECAP archive

Questions