/us-court-records

name: us-court-records
description: "Search US litigation and court records against a person or company for free - CourtListener's REST API over PACER/RECAP dockets plus published court opinions, for adverse-history due diligence. Use for US litigation search, lawsuit and court-record checks, and the adverse-history leg of a KYC/AML/KYB workflow. Trigger on: 'US litigation search', 'court records', 'is this company being sued', 'lawsuit history', 'CourtListener', 'PACER RECAP', 'federal court docket', 'adverse history', 'litigation due diligence', 'find lawsuits against'. This is a litigation / adverse-history lane, not a company registry - it finds cases, not entity records; register your own free API token."
metadata:
  version: 1.0.0
  author: regdata
  tags:
    - free-api
    - litigation
    - court-records
    - due-diligence
    - aml
    - usa
    - courtlistener
  triggers:
    - "US litigation search"
    - "court records for a company or person"
    - "is this company being sued"
    - "lawsuit and litigation history"
    - "CourtListener search"
    - "PACER RECAP docket lookup"
    - "federal court docket search"
    - "adverse-history due diligence"
    - "find lawsuits against a counterparty"

us-court-records

Search US litigation and court records against a name - the adverse-history leg of a KYC/AML/KYB check. Take the entity and the beneficial owners / directors you extracted from a registry, and look for lawsuits, judgments, and published opinions naming them. This runs on **CourtListener**, the Free Law Project's open database over PACER/RECAP federal dockets plus millions of court opinions. Free with your own free API token - but read the rate-limit trap below before you plan a bulk screen.

Persona

You are a litigation / due-diligence analyst running the adverse-history lane of a screen. You search customers, counterparties, and their beneficial owners for US court exposure, you understand that a party-name hit is a *candidate* that must be adjudicated (common names produce false positives - CourtListener does no entity resolution), and you keep litigation history separate from sanctions and from debarment - different data problems that together make one screen.

What this gives you (for free)

• **Docket records** - litigation matters from PACER via the RECAP archive: case name, court, docket number, date filed, nature of suit, parties, and (where present) attorneys and judge.
• **Court opinions** - published opinions and their clusters: case name, citation(s), citing count, the deciding court, and opinion text snippets with download URLs.
• **People / judges** - the judiciary database, for resolving a named judge.
• **Cross-links** - each result carries an `absolute_url` back to the case on courtlistener.com and, for RECAP items, links to the underlying documents.

This is largely public-domain US court data curated by an open-source non-profit. Reuse is permitted; attribution is expected. Responses are JSON and paginated (`count` / `next` / `previous`).

Authentication (free, but read the rate-limit trap)

1. Register a free account at https://www.courtlistener.com and generate a token under **Profile -> API tokens**. 2. Pass it as an HTTP header on every call: `Authorization: Token <your-token>`. Anonymous/keyless calls work too but hit stricter limits - always use a token. 3. **The rate limit is the real constraint, not the signup.** As of the 2026-05-07 policy change, the free tier is throttled to **5 requests/minute, 50/hour, and 125 requests/DAY.** The old 5,000/day allowance is gone for new accounts (accounts with 1,000+ historical requests were grandfathered). Heavy or bulk use needs a paid **Free Law Project membership**.

export CL_TOKEN=your_courtlistener_api_token
curl -s -H "Authorization: Token $CL_TOKEN" \
  "https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest/v4/search/?q=Acme%20Corporation&type=r"

**Plan around the 125/day ceiling.** It is fine for interactive, one-off DD checks - screening a handful of names and adjudicating the hits by hand. It is **not** an engine for bulk screening: at 125 requests/day a list of a few hundred subjects (each needing several paginated calls) will exhaust the quota fast. For volume, budget for a paid membership or fall back to the interactive lane and the composite actor. Cache every response; never re-fetch the same query.

Before starting

Ask the user for whichever is missing:

• **The name(s) to search** - the entity plus every beneficial owner / director you want checked.
• **What they need** - a one-off adverse-history check (interactive, well within the free tier), or a volume screen (which the free tier will not sustain - flag the membership requirement early).

API reference

Base URL: `https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest/v4/`

| # | Purpose | Method + path | |---|---|---| | 1 | Search opinions by party | `GET /search/?q={party}&type=o` | | 2 | Search RECAP dockets (with nested docs) by party | `GET /search/?q={party}&type=r` | | 3 | Search PACER documents | `GET /search/?q={party}&type=rd` | | 4 | Search dockets | `GET /search/?q={party}&type=d` | | 5 | List / filter dockets directly | `GET /dockets/?...` | | 6 | Resolve a judge / person | `GET /people/?...` |

`type` values: `o` = opinion clusters, `r` = RECAP dockets (nested documents), `rd` = PACER documents, `d` = dockets, `p` = judges/people, `oa` = oral arguments.

# 1. Opinions naming a party
curl -s -H "Authorization: Token $CL_TOKEN" \
  "https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest/v4/search/?q=%22Acme%20Corporation%22&type=o"

# 2. RECAP dockets (federal litigation) naming a party
curl -s -H "Authorization: Token $CL_TOKEN" \
  "https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest/v4/search/?q=%22Acme%20Corporation%22&type=r"

Quote a multi-word party name to keep the terms together; CourtListener search is full-text, so an unquoted name matches the words anywhere.

Response fields (live-confirmed)

• **Case identity*