Microproduct data guideintermediate

GovInfo U.S. Courts Opinions

Published federal court opinions from GPO GovInfo for building bounded case lookup and docket-research tools.

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At a glance

Difficulty
Intermediate — some data preparation helps
Size
Medium · ≤5 GB
Formats
JSON, XML, PDF
Access
API or Download
API key
Required
Provider
U.S. Government Publishing Office
Updates
Daily
Data terms
U.S. Government public data / GPO terms of use

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

GovInfo's USCOURTS collection hosts published federal opinions. Start with one court package id through the API. Coverage is not every federal case, unpublished opinions are often missing, and the collection is not a citator.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • A free api.data.gov key saved in the DATA_GOV_API_KEY environment variable
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Register for a free api.data.gov key and save it in DATA_GOV_API_KEY.
  2. 2.Open the USCOURTS collection page and copy one court collection code.
  3. 3.Request a small search of opinion granules for that court.
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3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas requests

import os
import pandas as pd
import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://api.govinfo.gov/search",
    params={
        "api_key": os.environ["DATA_GOV_API_KEY"],
        "query": "collection:USCOURTS courtCode:ca9",
        "pageSize": 20,
        "offsetMark": "*",
    },
    timeout=30,
)
response.raise_for_status()
opinions = pd.json_normalize(response.json()["results"])
opinions["retrieved_at_utc"] = pd.Timestamp.now(tz="UTC")
print(opinions.head())
4

Test a useful signal

List recent Ninth Circuit opinions

Test whether GovInfo search can power a bounded federal-opinion inbox.

  1. 01Keep package id, title, and dateIssued from the search page.
  2. 02Sort by date and list records missing a court code.
  3. 03Explain that USCOURTS coverage is incomplete and that search hits are not a citator or docket history.

Dataset details

U.S. Government Publishing Office is a government source. Last verified 2026-08-18. Temporal coverage: participating federal courts with collection-specific start dates.

Theme

Government & Policy

Domains

JusticePublic PolicyLegislation

Data types

DocumentsText

Tasks

Case ResearchLegal MonitoringSearch

Geography

United States

Formats

JSONXMLPDF

Provider

U.S. Government Publishing Office

Data terms

U.S. Government public data / GPO terms of use