docketx/us-caselaw-fed-district

U.S. District Courts Case Law

Code & tools: github.com/docketx — legal-scrambler pseudonymises a case file on your own hardware before a frontier model sees it; claude-for-legal is the Claude Code plugin (docketx-open-law) that loads these datasets and checks citations against them.

Source & credit — Free Law Project / CourtListener

Every opinion in this dataset comes from the Free Law Project / CourtListener bulk export of 2026-06-30 (10,798,347 opinions). CourtListener gathered, cleaned, deduplicated and published that record; Free Law Project — the 501(c)(3) non-profit behind it, building free public access to American law since 2010 — pays for it. We sliced and reformatted; they did the hard part. Go to the source: <https://www.courtlistener.com>.

Free Law Project is a non-profit, and it is worth supporting: <https://free.law/donate/>. If this data is useful to you, credit Free Law Project and CourtListener too, and consider going straight to the source: CourtListener runs its own API and MCP server.

Full text of 1,199,105 U.S. District Courts appellate opinion documents from the public record, sliced from the Free Law Project / CourtListener bulk export of 2026-06-30.

Court coverage (125 court ids, explicit allowlist — never prefix-matched): akd, ald, almd, alnd, alsd, ard, ared, arwd, azd, cacd, caed, californiad, canalzoned, cand, casd, cod, ctd, dcd, ded, fld, flmd, flnd, flsd, gad, gamd, gand, gasd, gud, hid, iad, iand, iasd, idd, ilcd, illinoisd, illinoised, ilnd, ilsd, indianad, innd, insd, ksd, kyd, kyed, kywd, lad, laed, lamd, lawd, mad, mdd, med, michd, mied, missd, miwd, mnd, mod, moed, mowd, msnd, mssd, mtd, ncd, nced, ncmd, ncwd, ndd, ned, nhd, njd, nmd, nmid, nvd, nyd, nyed, nynd, nysd, nywd, ohiod, ohnd, ohsd, okd, oked, oknd, okwd, ord, orld, paed, pamd, pawd, pennsylvaniad, prd, rid, scd, sdd, southcarolinaed, southcarolinawd, superctsdfla, tennessed, texd, tned, tnmd, tnwd, txed, txnd, txsd, txwd, usdistct, utd, vad, vaed, vawd, vid, vtd, waed, washd, wawd, wied, wisd, wiwd, wvad, wvnd, wvsd, wyd.

Lead opinions and separate opinions; documents under 1 characters excluded. Slice sha256 ff1bd031a0b921e7e949dae85af67d00ac63a4ff3182e00f91dc01dab9a86aa6 (also in slice.manifest.json).

Composition

Measured on this exact slice: 1,172,382 documents (97.8%) carry 2,000+ characters of text, 24,805 (2.1%) carry 200-1,999, and 1,918 (0.2%) are under 200 characters. The short ones are real records, not errors: certiorari denials, one-line orders, and judgment entries. They are kept deliberately (min_chars = 1) so this is the complete public record rather than a filtered subset. Filter on len(text) if you want only substantive opinions.

Format

Rows follow docketx record v1 (one opinion per line): id, doc_type, jurisdiction, title, text, source, license, retrieved_at, plus citation, court, date, and extra (CourtListener opinion/cluster ids, opinion type). The same format is used across every docketx dataset.

Provenance and license

Judicial opinions are edicts of government: uncopyrightable works of the public domain (Banks v. Manchester, 128 U.S. 244 (1888); Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, 590 U.S. 255 (2020)). This packaging is released under CC0 1.0. Source: CourtListener bulk export (2026-06-30), Free Law Project — https://free.law. This dataset redistributes public-domain court text; it adds no annotation and asserts no rights.

Load it

from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("docketx/us-caselaw-fed-district")

Part of the DocketRouter legal corpora: https://huggingface.co/docketx