Free Law Project ⚖

“Our goal for almost 20 years now has been to create this vision … where there is a lot of organizations competing to create good legal innovation and affordable legal research tools.”

We're proud to be partnering with @archive.org , @eff.org, @freedom.press and others on the Aaron Swartz Hackathon November 8. The event will support multiple projects that improve public access to knowledge. Learn more and register today. www.aaronswartzday.org

The Open Courts Act of 2026 would modernize PACER and tear down the paywall between the public and court records. And we need it now more than ever: PACER is set to increase per-page fees by 20%. free.law/2026/10/21/p...

Join our fully-remote team at Free Law Project and help us bring accountability to the court system. free.law/2026/10/07/f...

Paywalls on court documents impede democracy. But instead of getting rid of PACER fees, the judiciary is implementing a 20% fee hike. free.law/2026/10/21/p...

CourtListener: ✅️ Free access to over half a billion court records ✅️ A searchable database; you input phrases and it finds relevant cases ✅️ Free software and open databases with API ✅️ Actual court records; zero AI hallucinations Try it now: www.courtlistener.com

This is big. The Supreme Court is unable to hear a crucial copyright case because of financial conflicts. As @jtlg.bsky.social explains, this means they won't be overruling "one of the worst copyright decisions in recent memory" bsky.app/profile/jtlg...

We're hiring a director of philanthropy. The ideal candidate will have some experience in a tech and/or law nonprofit, but the most important thing is a passion for justice and an eagerness to build something great. Apply today: free.law/2026/10/07/f...

Chat with our Director of Justice Initiatives at the A2J network conference!

What happens when people without lawyers turn to AI in the courtroom? Hear from our Justice Initiatives Director Jessica Frank at the Access to Justice conference this Thursday in Cincinnati: a2jnetworkconference2026.sched.com/event/2O4Uu/...

A cybersecurity incident is disrupting bankruptcy court operations. Multiple websites are down and the related bankruptcy noticing process are still unavailable. cybernews.com/security/us-...

If anything, install the RECAP plugin so that anything you pay to look at on PACER, it can be the last time anybody has to pay for it. I've relied so much on the RECAP archive and have in turn contributed many, many dockets to the cause 20-40 cents at a time.

When we started in 2010, funders turned us down. They said publishing every court record would be impossible. Today, our databases are some of the largest in the world and used millions of times daily. Help us fund the next chapter of equitable, accessible courts. donate.free.law/forms/suppor...

Our Justice Initiatives team visited courts across the country to learn what barriers people face when they come to court without a lawyer. free.law/2026/10/05/a...

My quarterly bill is due for accessing federal court documents—and I make them free for others to read via @free.law's Courtlistener! The damage is $62.40. Support our independent journalism at @autonomynews.co with a one-time gift to help pay this bill:

Please help spread the word about this fully remote job leading Free Law Project's fundraising team. free.law/2026/10/07/f...

Dream job alert: Come join our team at @Free.law as our next fundraising director. free.law/2026/10/07/f...

Today is DAF Day! If you believe that court data belongs to the public, recommend a grant from your Donor Advised Fund to Free Law Project today. wiki.free.law/c/donations-...

Our new Litigant Portal is a tool that will support the many people who come to court without a lawyer. To guide its development, our Justice Initiatives team visited courts across the country to see firsthand the challenges these litigants face. free.law/2026/10/05/a...

This promo ended yesterday. We hope you got a chance to try our tool that connects CourtListener into ChatGPT. If you haven't the idea is for everybody to have access to powerful legal research for all of their needs.

The Thomson v. ROSS Intelligence opinion is now published, and it mostly does no harm. In particular, it doesnt rule on AI training in general or on the market dilution theory. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

CourtListener is experiencing downtime today due to an aggressive crawler using many IP addresses to hit our last remaining open APIs. We're adding authentication to these APIs so they're no longer open, and should be back up momentarily. Sorry about this. The crawlers have become a scourge.

Today we completed our first end-to-end pipeline: - Scan case law book - Partition book into decision PDFs - Auto-redact headnotes etc - Review redactions - Extract using OCR ensemble - Label metadata - Convert to XML Easy-peasy.

Yesterday, as part of our scanning project, we scanned our two-millionth page of case law. Woo! free.law/2026/04/16/s...

CourtListener is now available in ChatGPT. To celebrate, API rate limits are doubled for everyone through Oct 1 Read more in our blog - free.law/2026/09/17/g... #LegalResearch #MCP #ChatGPTEnterprise

New: @apnews.com today sued the U.S. federal judiciary to challenge the constitutionality of a rule that has restricted reporters' ability to easily access lawsuits by people detained as part of President ​Donald Trump's immigration crackdown. www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

Plumb the law.

Ok, fine, we’ll add this as a feature in our PDF analysis tool: github.com/freelawproje...

Don’t try to prompt inject a judge. It won’t end well.

The way AI is being used is changing rapidly, and we've developed three policies to keep our work safe and ethical. The first informs how FLP staff can use AI in their work, the second is for developing AI features on CourtListener, and the third is for our volunteers: free.law/2026/08/10/a...

We have updated our terms of service to strengthen our approach to copyright violations. Apologies for the many updates of late! Latest: wiki.free.law/c/terms/cour... Diff: wiki.free.law/c/terms/cour... Subscribe: wiki.free.law/c/terms/cour...

A podcast featuring our director and talking about how we work to make the law available to all.