zalizedata/us-court-opinions-dockets-judges-dataset

US Court Opinions Metadata, Dockets & Judges (CourtListener)

10M opinion clusters, 70M dockets and 16K judges from official CourtListener / Free Law Project bulk data as metadata + derived-signals tables — citation graph, company litigation profiles; no opinion full text.

Part of the DataForge Open Data program — full production packages, free for academic and personal use. Canonical dataset page: [https://data.zalize.com/datasets/us-court-opinions-dockets-judges-dataset](https://data.zalize.com/datasets/us-court-opinions-dockets-judges-dataset)

Package inventory (original bundles, served from CDN)

All files are also served from the machine-readable open-data index: <https://dl.zalize.com/open-data> (per-package URL: https://dl.zalize.com/open-data/<package_id>).

Native parquet files (this repo)

Every table ships as snappy parquet under data/<tier>/ and renders in the Dataset Viewer above (one config per tier / table).

Original zip bundles (archive download)

The original production packages (csv + parquet + data dictionary + datasheet + license inside) are served from the DataForge open-data CDN (free, same license):

• —`courtlistener-tier1-S-2026-08-04.zip` (73.9 MB, tier S)
• —`courtlistener-tier1-M-2026-08-04.zip` (374.7 MB, tier M)
• —`courtlistener-tier1-L-2026-08-04.zip` (2.30 GB, tier L)

What you get

• —S — Starter slice: 2.3M rows of cases and courts
• —M — Research pack: 7.4M rows incl. judges and derived signals
• —L — Full metadata library incl. citation-graph edges and litigation profiles
• —No opinion full text — metadata and derived signals only
• —Data dictionary, datasheet and QA report included with every package

Use cases

• —Litigation-risk and legal-analytics research
• —Judicial-behavior studies
• —Company litigation-exposure profiling (organizational parties only)
• —Citation-network analysis

Source & methodology

CourtListener / Free Law Project official bulk data (opinion clusters, dockets, judges; metadata + derived signals only)

Coverage, update cadence and the full field-level data dictionary are on the dataset page: https://data.zalize.com/datasets/us-court-opinions-dockets-judges-dataset (DATA-DICTIONARY.md and DATASHEET.md are inside each package zip).

License

Dual license — CC BY-NC 4.0 (DataForge curated layer; academic/personal use, attribution + backlink required); commercial use requires a DataForge commercial license. Upstream data: CourtListener / Free Law Project bulk data, Public Domain Mark 1.0; opinion full text NOT included

• —Academic / personal use: CC BY-NC 4.0 on the DataForge curated layer — attribution and a backlink to <https://data.zalize.com> are required.
• —Commercial use: requires a DataForge commercial license — contact us via the portal.
• —Upstream license terms continue to apply to the underlying data.

Citation

DataForge (data.zalize.com), built from CourtListener / Free Law Project public-domain bulk data — https://data.zalize.com/datasets/us-court-opinions-dockets-judges-dataset

DOI (Zenodo mirror): 10.5281/zenodo.21838140 · GitHub Release mirror: https://github.com/wookat/dataforge-pipelines/releases/tag/open-data-us-court-records

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("zalizedata/us-court-opinions-dockets-judges-dataset", "S-cases", split="train")
print(ds[0])

Available configs: S-cases, S-citations, S-courts, S-judges, S-opinions, M-cases, M-citations, M-court_year_stats, M-courts, M-judge_positions, M-judges, M-opinions, L-cases, L-citations, L-company_litigation_profiles, L-company_litigation_yearly, L-court_year_stats, L-courthouses, L-courts, L-judge_positions, L-judges, L-opinions, L-oral_arguments.

Related datasets

More DataForge open datasets in Health, Law & Science:

• —Clinical Trials & Drug Approvals (ClinicalTrials.gov + FDA)
• —Global Research Output & Mobility (OpenAlex)

Full catalog (25 datasets): <https://data.zalize.com/open-data> · all HF repos: <https://huggingface.co/zalizedata>