Free Law Project ⚖

I’ve been making a similar argument for a while. Want to stop AI hallucinations? Start with open data.

Waves of Justice at UC Law SF: When Data Becomes Art UC Law San Francisco unveiled Tidal Wave of Justice, a large-scale installation that transforms legal citation data from CourtListener into a living visual experience.

Every citation tells a story. At UC Law SF, those stories now move across three pillars in waves of light — powered by real-time data from CourtListener.

Open data can be many things. Sometimes it becomes art!
free.law/2026/02/20/w...

Release ACMS, Round Two: PDFs uploads are back on the menu · freelawproject/recap-chrome This release restores and improves support for the newly refactored ACMS website. Changes: Restored support for uploading PDFs from the new ACMS website The extension once again supports uploadin...

A new version of RECAP is rolling out now. It finally brings back support for the second and ninth circuits. This was needed because they overhauled their PACER systems —twice! Thanks for your patience as we played catch up. github.com/freelawproje...

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server – CourtListener.com CourtListener is developing an MCP server to enable AI assistants to access legal data through our APIs.

One of our top requests lately is to develop an MCP server. This will allow you to seamlessly access our APIs from tools like ChatGPT and Claude. We're working on it and eager to hear your input: www.courtlistener.com/help/mcp/

Sorry, CA2 changed their website. We're working to get RECAP fixed, but it's a major change on their side.

Organized Money: The Monopolists Who Gatekeep the Court System - The American Prospect If you want to read the laws that govern, you have to pay a steep price. Break a duopoly and this can be changed.

Our director was on the Organized Money podcast talking about monopoly powers in the legal space. It's a great, wonky conversation about why legal research is so expensive, the barriers to fixing it — And how we're working to break them down! prospect.org/2026/01/30/o...

Things seem to be back up. It was a tough one, sorry for the downtime. The problem wasn't somebody sending a LOT of queries, it was somebody sending a few really nasty ones, which we've now blocked until we can optimize them.

We’re experiencing extremely high pressure on our search engine. We’re working to find the cause.

Unfortunately, some are using these files to become legal data providers, making it harder for us to do all the things mentioned above.

Hopefully today's change will strike a better balance that can still spur innovation and research, but without us giving away everything quite so often. 6/6

This also supports free API data access that we give to more and more legal researchers, journalists, and startups every day.

Bulk data files are available to help legal researchers do empirical work, and to help legal orgs prototype new technology. 5/6

Data agreements with ethical organizations are a source of revenue for us when donations and grants are not enough.

This allows us to host our website with half a billion records and thousands of users, including academic researchers and journalists. Last year, we served over 800M downloads. 4/6

Few people used these visualizations and they've already been in maintenance mode for years.

We're launching a new version of CourtListener later this year, and rebuilding the visualizations on the new site would be a lot of work. It's a natural time to scale them back to API/embed only. 3/6

The visualizations will be removed from our website, but are still available via our API and as embeds. If you find them useful, you can make new vis's via API and put them on your website, just not ours anymore. 2/6

Our Newest Launch: A SCOTUS Data Viz Tool Free Law Project is the leading nonprofit using technology and data to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive. Creators of CourtListener, RECAP, and Bots.law.

We're rolling out a couple of changes today that should help support our mission without impacting many of our users.

1. In 2016, we launched a tool to make SCOTUS visualizations. We're deprecating it today.

2. We're making bulk data available quarterly instead of monthly. 1/6

To be clear, we’re thrilled they’ve overhauled PACER in these circuits. They actually did it twice, but didn’t like the technical approach the first time. That’s courts being agile!

The second and ninth circuits overhauled their websites again, so RECAP is not working there. We’re working on a fix, but reverse engineering takes time. Hopefully this week.

Our x-ray tool is featured on the Real Python podcast!

Summer Stats: CourtListener API Surpasses 100 Million Requests Since its release last fall, CourtListener’s v4 API has processed more than 100 million requests. Developers and organizations are building research tools, civic projects, and legal technology on top ...

In September we shared that our new API had served one hundred million requests in about a year. Just hit 250 million. free.law/2025/09/29/o...

AI is making it very hard to maintain CourtListener as an open website without blowing our budget. Vibe coders are using our APIs poorly and very powerful scrapers are running wild. We'll of course stay the course, but it's difficult. Sorry again.

Apologies for the downtime we just experienced. We're still evaluating what happened, but first look seems to be that traffic to CourtListener doubled in a matter of seconds and overwhelmed our DB. Likely cause: Scrapers.

Our 2025 Director's Letter In 2025, we launched revolutionary tools, earned major awards, grew our team, and reached historic milestones. Here's how your support made it possible.

In case you missed it, our director's annual letter came out during the holidays. It's a good read and shows just how impactful your contributions can be. We're building a better legal system, one day at a time, and your support really helps! free.law/fundraiser/2...

This is such a great conference, a must attend for those working in access to justice tech. It's chock full of all the people who care, who are doing the things, and who want to collaborate and build a better legal system. Propose a session (due tomorrow) or plan to attend in October!

Anyone else have any connections at NASA to speak about that library being disposed of and if the internet archive can help find a home?

That said, we do have ideas for making this smoother. The catch is that it will take time we could spend on other things... ⚖️

It actually works well. Lots of people appreciate what we do, recognize that the extension brings them value, and contribute, despite this being a nuisance.

We don’t make you log into the extension, so without this or something similar, we have very few ways to reach people.

To usher in the new year, two of our main servers failed and did not get automatically replaced. We were down for about two hours, but we're back now. Apologies for the trouble and downtime. We're investigating the root cause.

From the freelawproject community on Reddit: We released version 0.2.0 of django-s3-express-cache Explore this post and more from the freelawproject community

HNY! We just released a new version of our high-performance, scalable cache for Django. Details here: www.reddit.com/r/freelawpro...

I do a lot with legal data, so as you can imagine I love this nonprofit!

They can add to this list reporting for @nbcnews.com-owned stations. If anyone has a good tutorial for their new API, please send it, as I have yet use it much.

Fantastic resource if you are interested in federal court data.

Reposting this for those that missed it last week. We hope you’ll check out what we accomplished and consider supporting our work.

Judges who ruled against Trump say harassment and threats have changed their lives More than 100 pizzas were delivered to the homes of judges and their families this year, some with signs of foreign involvement. Judges say the message is clear: We know where you live.

NEW:

One brought a gun home.

One moved.

Others improved home security.

Life as a federal judge in the age of Trump:

www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...