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{% block title %}APIs and Bulk Data – CourtListener.com{% endblock %}
{% block description %}
    Legal APIs and Bulk Data from Free Law Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
{% endblock %}
{% block og_description %}
    Legal APIs and Bulk Data from Free Law Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
{% endblock %}
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  <h1 class="text-center v-offset-below-3">CourtListener APIs and Bulk Legal&nbsp;Data</h1>
</div>

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  <p>We currently have four services available to researchers and organizations using our platform:
  </p>
  <ol>
    <li>
      <p>For those that need the fastest and most granular form of our data, we <a href="{% url "replication_docs" %}">offer our database replication service</a>. This service provides a logical replica of our PostgreSQL database onto a server in your network where you can query it.
      </p>
    </li>
    <li>
      <p>If you are interested in obtaining large quantities of our data, we <a
        href="{% url "bulk_data_index" %}">recommend using bulk data files</a>. These provide compressed JSON files of our opinion and people databases, by object type and jurisdiction
      </p>
    </li>
    <li>
      <p>For usages that require less data, such as keeping up to date with the latest filings, accessing a subset of the data or performing RECAP uploads, we <a href="{% url "rest_docs" %}">recommend using our REST APIs</a>.
      </p>
    </li>
    <li>
      <p>Finally, we also <a href="https://free.law/data-consulting/">offer custom data services</a> and custom bulk file creation, with hourly and project-based rates.
      </p>
    </li>
  </ol>
  <p>We make these services available according to means-based pricing. This allows a variety of researchers, journalists, and organizations to access this information.
  </p>
  <p>The goal of these charges is to provide ongoing support for these APIs and for <a href="https://free.law" target="_blank">Free Law Project</a>, the 501(c)(3) non-profit supporting CourtListener and RECAP. We hope you'll agree that that is an important cause.
  </p>
  <p>Depending on what makes sense for the organization and the project, support for Free Law Project can take the form of monthly subscriptions, one time fees for service, or revenue share agreements.
  </p>
</div>
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  <div class="row v-offset-below-3 v-offset-above-3">
    <table class="table table-responsive table-striped text-center">
      <tbody>
      <tr>
        <td class="align-middle"><h3 class="top">Learn More About&hellip;</h3></td>
        <td class="align-middle"><h4 class="top">Update<br>Speed</h4></td>
        <td class="align-middle"><h4 class="top">Data<br>Quantity</h4></td>
        <td class="align-middle"><h4 class="top">Query<br>Flexibility</h4></td>
        <td class="align-middle"><h4 class="top">Learning<br>Curve</h4></td>
        <td class="align-middle"><h4 class="top">Setup</h4></td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td><a href="{% url "replication_docs" %}"
               class="btn btn-lg btn-primary btn-block">Replication</a></td>
        <td class="align-middle">Instant</td>
        <td class="align-middle">Complete</td>
        <td class="align-middle">Unlimited<br>SQL Queries</td>
        <td class="align-middle">Short</td>
        <td class="align-middle">Complex</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td><a href="{% url "bulk_data_index" %}"
               class="btn btn-lg btn-primary btn-block">Bulk Data</a></td>
        <td class="align-middle">Slow</td>
        <td class="align-middle">Great</td>
        <td class="align-middle">None</td>
        <td class="align-middle">Short</td>
        <td class="align-middle">None</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td><a href="{% url "rest_docs" %}"
               class="btn btn-lg btn-primary btn-block">REST APIs</a></td>
        <td class="align-middle">Fast</td>
        <td class="align-middle">Good</td>
        <td class="align-middle">Filters &amp;<br> Joins</td>
        <td class="align-middle">Longer</td>
        <td class="align-middle">None</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td><a href="https://free.law/data-consulting/"
               class="btn btn-lg btn-success btn-block">Data Services</a></td>
        <td colspan="5" class="text-left">Engage with Free Law Project, the non-profit behind CourtListener and RECAP, for the most flexibility.
        </td>
      </tr>
      </tbody>
    </table>
  </div>
</div>
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  <div class="row">
    <div class="col-sm-6">
      <h2 id="pride">We're Proud of our Data</h2>
      <p>Over the past several years, we have made a significant investment in making our data the best on the open Web. Among the minor enhancements we make on a regular basis, we've made significant improvements to our data that you won't find in other sources:
      </p>
      <ol>
        <li>We've <a href="https://free.law/2011/05/25/updated-supreme-court-case-dates-and-the-first-release-of-early-scotus-data-in-machine-readable-form/">
            added exact dates from the library of congress</a> to our collection
            of older Supreme Court cases, enhancing thousands of cases beyond what's
            available anywhere else.
        </li>
        <li>When we imported the Resource.org data, we <a href="https://free.law/2011/08/25/second-series-of-federal-reporter-from-1950-to-1993-now-on-courtlistener/">
            manually corrected</a> more than ten thousand omissions or
            errors in the data, ensuring that it's complete and accurate.
        </li>
        <li>Our data has <a href="https://free.law/2012/05/11/building-a-citator-on-courtlistener/">
            the citation network</a>, showing which cases reference each
            other, saving you the effort of building and testing a citation
            finding and matching algorithm yourself.
        </li>
        <li>We complete complicated cleanup routines on the data, eliminating and
            fixing errant abbreviations like 'et al', 'U.S.A.' and the like.
        </li>
        <li>The data on CourtListener is a combination of many partial sources such
            as court websites, <a href="https://public.resource.org/">Public.Resource.Org</a>,
            and a donation from <a href="http://lawboxapps.com">Lawbox LLC.</a>
            This means that we have the best parts of all of our sources.
        </li>
        <li>We help identify opinions that should be private. Many people don't want their case on the Web and have contacted us. In our data we provide a field indicating which cases should be kept private. In addition, we provide research about how to keep these cases out of search engines (more detail at right).
        </li>
      </ol>
      <p>You can learn more about the data that we have on our <a href="{% url "coverage" %}">coverage page</a>.</p>
    </div>

    <div class="col-sm-6">
      <h2 id="privacy">Privacy of Court Materials</h2>
      <p>As is <a href="{% url "terms" %}#removal">explained in our removal policy</a>, we block public search engines from indexing many of the cases available in our data. We do this through a combination of automatic and manual procedures.
      </p>
      <p>As you work with this data, it is essential that you be cognizant of the privacy and safety issues involved with legal documents. This impacts real people with real privacy concerns. This includes jailed confidential informants, the victims of stalkers, foreign citizens with rejected asylum requests, children who were named incidentally in a case about their parent's wrongdoings, exhonorated individuals, and the list goes on.
      </p>

      <p>If you intend to use this data on the Internet, carefully consider how you will protect these people and respect the privacy wishes of the parties involved. Please read our privacy policy for our approach to this problem and identify the "<code>blocked</code>" field in each case. This field  describes whether we have blocked search engines from indexing the case. The simple thing for you to do is to also block such cases.
      </p>

      <p>Please also note that robots.txt is a wholly insufficient way to block court documents from search engines. For a better technical approach, please see the blog entries below.
      </p>
      <ul>
        <li>
          <a href="https://free.law/2012/01/16/respecting-privacy-while-providing-hundreds-of-thousands-of-public-documents/">
                Respecting privacy while providing hundreds of thousands of public documents
          </a>
        </li>
        <li>
        <a href="https://free.law/2012/01/25/support-for-x-robots-tag-and-robots-html-meta-tag/">
              Support for x-robots-tag and robots HTML meta tag
          </a>
        </li>
        <li>
          <a href="https://free.law/2012/04/27/further-privacy-protections-at-courtlistener/">
              Further privacy protections at CourtListener
          </a>
        </li>
      </ul>
    </div>
  </div>
  <div class="row v-offset-above-2">
    <div class="col-sm-4">
      <h2>Available Jurisdictions</h2>
      <p>We currently have <strong>{{ court_count }}</strong> jurisdictions that can be accessed with our APIs including bankruptcy, district, circuit, state, and various other special purpose courts. We do not typically have county or municipal courts.
      </p>
      <p><a href="{% url "court_index" %}" class="btn btn-primary btn-lg">View Jurisdiction Details</a></p>
    </div>
    <div class="col-sm-4">
      <h2>Feedback and Updates</h2>
      <p>To stay up to date about our APIs please follow the <a href="https://twitter.com/courtlistener">CourtListener Twitter account</a> and the <a href="https://free.law/">Free Law Project blog</a>, where updates will be posted. To give us feedback, <a href="{% url "contact" %}">simply send us an email</a>.
      </p>
      <p><a href="https://twitter.com/freelawproject" class="btn btn-primary btn-lg"><i class="fa fa-twitter"></i>&nbsp;Follow Free Law Project</a></p>
    </div>
    <div class="col-sm-4">
      <h2 id="copyright">Copyright</h2>
      <p>Our bulk data is free of known copyright restrictions.<br />
        <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/">
          <img src="https://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" height="31" width="88"/>
        </a>
      </p>
      <p>For a more nuanced analysis of copyright in the RECAP Archive please see <a href="https://free.law/recap/faq/#is-sharing-court-documents-a-violation-o">our FAQ on the topic</a>.
      </p>
    </div>
  </div>
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