Started in 2010, the non-profit organization Free Law Project provides access to court cases, court filings and the dockets that show the latest updates to pending and breaking litigation. A lot of this content comes from the federal PACER system, which is an acronym for “Public Access to Court Electronic Records” – As the name suggests, the aim here is for public access to these records, which are almost always filed electronically with the federal courts. The court provides a Fee Exemption Request for Researchers, but docket filings are not free by default.
As their name suggests, free (as in no cost for access) is at the heart of what the Free Law Project does.
As a reminder to our students and others wanting to research current law, the project provides these services:
- The RECAP Suite — A collection of tools to open up federal court data.
- CourtListener.com — A fully-searchable and accessible archive of court data including growing repositories of opinions, oral arguments, judges, judicial financial records, and federal filings.
- Bots.law — A collection of bots that help attorneys, journalists and the public keep up with court cases.
One of the latest features they have added is called the “Pray and Pay Project” – The concept is that people can “pray” for a court filing that adds it to a sort of wish list queue. Others wanting to support this will “pay” to add the item to the system.
As of early April, here is an overview of pending and granted requests:
Once you set up a free account, you can request docket items, set up alerts, and track activity in a wide range of pending court cases. If you are looking for the latest filings from a court case, or if you need to find a decision and cannot use Lexis or Westlaw, consider Court Listener and the Free Law Project sources.
NOTE: If you sign up for this service with a .edu email address (as a student or law professor, for instance), they provide free membership accounts. With this, you get unlimited docket alerts, unlimited real-time opinion searching and some other benefits. You have to renew this every six months, and you’ll get an automatic offer for this when you sign up.