CourtListener Court Opinions Scraper — Free Case Law Search

What this Actor scrapes

This Actor searches CourtListener's free, keyless full-text case-law API (opinions only — not RECAP/PACER dockets) and returns one structured row per matching case. Each row carries the case name, court, filing date, citation(s), cite count, and a direct link to the opinion.

CourtListener's search already covers 240,000+ U.S. court opinions for free — the work we sell is the handling: following CourtListener's cursor-based pagination correctly, isolating one malformed result so it doesn't crash the whole run, and shipping a clean, nullable dataset schema instead of a raw API passthrough.

What we handle for you

• 🛡️ We rotate browser fingerprints (curl-cffi impersonation) so every request looks like a real browser, not Python.
• 🔁 We retry with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 503 and honour Retry-After — up to 5 attempts per page.
• 🌐 We rotate residential proxies through Apify Proxy on every retry — fresh session, fresh exit IP.
• 🧱 We isolate per-row failures — one malformed result is skipped and logged, the run keeps going.
• 🧊 We keep the dataset clean — Pydantic-validated rows, nullable fields typed correctly, a stable url on every row.
• 💰 You pay only for cases that land. A search that matches nothing still succeeds — you're never charged for a failed run.

Use cases

• Legal research — pull every opinion matching a legal question, party name, or topic for a memo or brief.
• Litigation support — build a bulk case-law dataset for a matter without a PACER/docket subscription.
• Legal-tech products — feed a clean, structured case-law dataset into your own search or citation tool.
• Compliance / due diligence — check whether a party, company, or topic shows up in published case law.
• Academic research — pull opinions filed within a date range or court for empirical legal studies.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "query": "miranda rights",
  "maxResults": 100,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

cluster_idcase_namecourtdate_filedcitationcite_counturl

{
  "cluster_id": 10353022,
  "case_name": "Miranda v. Arizona",
  "case_name_full": "Ernesto A. Miranda v. State of Arizona",
  "court": "Supreme Court of the United States",
  "court_id": "scotus",
  "court_citation_string": "U.S.",
  "court_jurisdiction": null,
  "date_filed": "1966-06-13",
  "date_argued": null,
  "citation": [
    "384 U.S. 436"
  ],
  "cite_count": 8421,
  "attorney": "",
  "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/10353022/miranda-v-arizona/"
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.