Empirical Research and Data Services

The case law in CourtListener has been collected since 2009 by Free Law Project, a non-profit devoted to high-quality legal data. Bulk legal data downloads are supported.

CAP includes all official, book-published United States case law — every volume designated as an official report of decisions by a court within the United States.

Free online access. Annual report "presents statistics on the work of the Federal Judiciary for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2012, comparing data for this year to data for prior years and, when possible, explaining increases or decreases in caseloads."

Includes statistical data on the federal courts.

Free online access. "This section of uscourts.gov provides statistical data on the business of the federal Judiciary. Specific publications address the work of the appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts; the probation and pretrial services systems; and other components of the U.S. courts."

The Supreme Court Database is the definitive source for researchers, students, journalists, and citizens interested in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Database contains over two hundred pieces of information about each case decided by the Court from its founding to today. Examples include the identity of the court whose decision the Supreme Court reviewed, the parties to the suit, the legal provisions considered in the case, and the votes of the Justices.

Free online access. Provides data sets for over 200 different variables for cases decided between 1953 and 2008.

Access limited to NYU faculty and students. The section on "People" provides individual caseload and case disposition data for federal court judges.

The purpose of this data collection is to provide an official public record of the business of the federal courts. The data originate from 100 court offices throughout the United States. Information was obtained at two points in the life of a case: filing and termination. The termination data contain information on both filing and terminations, while the pending data contain only filing information. For the appellate and civil data, the unit of analysis is a single case. The unit of analysis for the criminal data is a single defendant.

The FJC, under a working arrangement with the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC), provides through this site public access to its Integrated Data Base (IDB). The IDB contains data on civil case and criminal defendant filings and terminations in the district courts, along with bankruptcy court and appellate court case information from 1970 to the present. The FJC receives regular updates of the case-related data that are routinely reported by the courts to the AOUSC. The FJC then post-processes the data, consistent with the policies of the Judicial Conference of the United States governing access to these data, into a unified longitudinal database, the IDB.

Free online access. This is "a joint project of the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) and the Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA) — publishes caseload data from the courts of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico."

Free online access.

Contains information for state Supreme Court cases from 1995-1998

This data collection provides comparable measures of state appellate and trial court caseloads by type of case for the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Court caseloads are tabulated according to generic reporting categories developed by the Court Statistics and Technology Committee of the Conference of State Court Administrators. These categories describe differences in the unit of count and the point of count when compiling each court's caseload. Major areas of investigation include: (1) case filings in state appellate and trial courts, (2) case dispositions in state appellate and trial courts, and (3) appellate opinions. Within each of these areas of investigation, cases are separated by main case type. Types include civil cases, capital punishment cases, other criminal cases, juvenile cases, administrative agency appeals, and several other types.