CourtListener
CourtListener is a free legal research platform operated by the Free Law Project, a nonprofit organization. It provides a comprehensive REST API for accessing US court opinions, dockets, oral arguments, judge biographical data, financial disclosures, and citation networks from federal and state courts. The platform archives over 9 million case law decisions, 500 million PACER-related items, 3.4 million minutes of oral arguments, and data on 16,000+ judges. Access is available through a membership model with rate limits scaling by tier; an EDU tier is free for academic users.
Real signal across most facets with visible, nameable gaps — the contract exists but is thin, or the portal is good while governance and commercial terms are absent.
API Evangelist profiles CourtListener the way a machine reads it — 45 machine-readable artifacts across 21 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — CourtListener scores 48.3/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 48/100 (agent ready). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile CourtListener
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for CourtListener. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 21
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
CourtListener Alerts API
The Alerts API from CourtListener — 2 operation(s) for alerts.
CourtListener Audio API
The Audio API from CourtListener — 2 operation(s) for audio.
CourtListener Citation API
The Citation API from CourtListener — 1 operation(s) for citation.
CourtListener Cited By API
The Cited By API from CourtListener — 1 operation(s) for cited by.
CourtListener Cites API
The Cites API from CourtListener — 1 operation(s) for cites.
CourtListener Courts API
The Courts API from CourtListener — 2 operation(s) for courts.
CourtListener Coverage API
The Coverage API from CourtListener — 1 operation(s) for coverage.
CourtListener Docket Alerts API
The Docket Alerts API from CourtListener — 2 operation(s) for docket alerts.
CourtListener Docket Entries API
The Docket Entries API from CourtListener — 2 operation(s) for docket entries.
CourtListener Dockets API
The Dockets API from CourtListener — 2 operation(s) for dockets.
CourtListener Financial Disclosures API
The Financial Disclosures API from CourtListener — 2 operation(s) for financial disclosures.
CourtListener FJC Database API
The FJC Database API from CourtListener — 2 operation(s) for fjc database.
CourtListener Jurisdiction API
The Jurisdiction API from CourtListener — 1 operation(s) for jurisdiction.
CourtListener Opinion API
The Opinion API from CourtListener — 1 operation(s) for opinion.
CourtListener Opinion Clusters API
The Opinion Clusters API from CourtListener — 2 operation(s) for opinion clusters.
CourtListener Opinions API
The Opinions API from CourtListener — 2 operation(s) for opinions.
CourtListener People API
The People API from CourtListener — 2 operation(s) for people.
CourtListener Positions API
The Positions API from CourtListener — 2 operation(s) for positions.
CourtListener RECAP Documents API
The RECAP Documents API from CourtListener — 2 operation(s) for recap documents.
CourtListener Search API
The Search API from CourtListener — 3 operation(s) for search.
CourtListener Visualizations API
The Visualizations API from CourtListener — 2 operation(s) for visualizations.
Scroll within the panel for all 21 ·
Pricing Plans 1
Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Rate Limits 1
Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
Court Listener Rate Limits
RATE LIMITSFinOps 1
Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.
Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.
Court Listener Finops
FINOPSSemantic Vocabularies 3
JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.
JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.
Court Listener Context
JSON-LDSpectral Rules 1
Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.
CourtListener API Rules
SPECTRALJSON Schema 9
Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.
Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.
Audio
JSON SCHEMAcitation
JSON SCHEMACourt
JSON SCHEMAcoverage
JSON SCHEMADocket
JSON SCHEMAjurisdiction
JSON SCHEMAOpinion
JSON SCHEMAPaginatedResponse
JSON SCHEMAPerson
JSON SCHEMAScroll within the panel for all 9 ·
Examples 5
Real request and response payloads are what turn a spec from abstract into obvious — and they're one of the twelve things an agent needs to call an API correctly on the first try.
Example request and response payloads for these APIs.
Court Listener Audio Example
EXAMPLESecurity Posture 2
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Agentic Access 1
An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
Resources
Every other property we hold for CourtListener — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Documentation 1
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Build 1
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 2
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Operate 1
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 3
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 3
The organization behind the API
Other 1
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
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