US Court Opinions Metadata, Dockets & Judges (CourtListener)

What you get

• S — Starter slice: 2.3M rows of cases and courts
• M — Research pack: 7.4M rows incl. judges and derived signals
• L — Full metadata library incl. citation-graph edges and litigation profiles
• No opinion full text — metadata and derived signals only
• Data dictionary, datasheet and QA report included with every package

Sample preview

First 50 rows of the real free-sample file — the identical schema you get in every package. Click a column to sort, or filter across all rows.

Coverage statistics

Records

46,485,000

Opinion clusters

10,070,727

Fields

142

Time coverage

19-01-31 – 2028-04-13

Largest package

2.5 GB

Available packages

Real contents of the current builds — row counts, sizes and checksums come from the packaging manifest, not estimates.

Built from the official 2026-06-30 CourtListener bulk snapshot: ~10M opinion clusters, ~70M dockets (RECAP included), 16k judges, 103k oral-argument recordings (see pipelines/courtlistener).

Free Open Data — full downloads

This dataset is part of the DataForge Open Data program: the upstream license (Dual license — CC BY-NC 4.0 (DataForge curated layer; academic/personal use, attribution + backlink required); commercial use requires a DataForge commercial license. Upstream data: CourtListener / Free Law Project bulk data, Public Domain Mark 1.0; opinion full text NOT included) permits free redistribution, so the complete packages below are free — no signup. Please cite DataForge (data.zalize.com) with a backlink when you use or share this data.

License: Dual license — CC BY-NC 4.0 (DataForge curated layer; academic/personal use, attribution + backlink required); commercial use requires a DataForge commercial license. Upstream data: CourtListener / Free Law Project bulk data, Public Domain Mark 1.0; opinion full text NOT included · Attribution: DataForge (data.zalize.com), built from CourtListener / Free Law Project public-domain bulk data

Full package inventory

Every package registered in the delivery catalog for this dataset — 27 packages, 18.5 GB total , 273,507,236 rows. Sizes, row counts and SHA-256 checksums come straight from the packaging pipeline.

How to get this data

All packages are hosted on the Hugging Face Hub: free/open packages live in a public dataset repo (direct downloads, no signup); paid or restricted editions are delivered from a private repo with token access after approval.

# Download the whole dataset repo (hf CLI — pip install -U huggingface_hub)
hf download zalizedata/us-court-opinions-dockets-judges-dataset --repo-type dataset --local-dir us-court-opinions-dockets-judges-dataset

Protocol access (hf://, resolve links, token auth for private repos) is documented in the developer docs →

Pricing

AI-training use requires the AI-Training tier (1.5× base); redistribution licensing is quoted individually. Annual subscriptions get 2 months free. License details →

Update frequency & delivery

• Source: official CourtListener / Free Law Project bulk data (Public Domain Mark 1.0). Opinion full text, attorney names and sensitive judge attributes are excluded by design.
• Every package ships with a MANIFEST (per-file row counts, bytes, sha256) for verification.

Compliance & provenance

Collected only from publicly accessible pages and endpoints — no login-required data, no CAPTCHA solving, no forged authentication. Collection is rate-limited with an identified User-Agent, and collection logs are retained. PII is removed or pseudonymized. Every record carries its source URL and collection timestamp. Sold under a tiered commercial license.

FAQ