Free federal caselaw search on LawDiver. Search U.S. Supreme Court, circuit courts, and district courts, read full text, download PDFs, and use the federal caselaw API. Browse all guides · Federal Courts research guide
Search federal caselaw for free on LawDiver. This index covers the U.S. Supreme Court, all thirteen federal courts of appeals, and the federal district courts — more than ten million opinions in total. Search by citation, case name, or a description of the legal issue, then read the full text and download the official PDF for any decision. No subscription and no login. Every search here is limited to federal courts; switch to a state page to add that state's courts.
Coverage includes the Supreme Court, the First through Eleventh Circuits plus the D.C. and Federal Circuits, and every federal district court, including specialty Article I and Article III courts in the corpus. Each opinion carries citation data, docket, date, and court, with an official PDF and a citation graph of about one hundred million resolved edges.
To search one state, open its page: California, Texas, New York, Florida, or any other state hub.
LawDiver legal research API·API docs·Federal Courts caselaw API·Search connectors·MCP server·CiteCheck
Search all federal courts at once, or narrow to a circuit.
This page defaults to all federal courts, including SCOTUS. Open the jurisdiction picker to narrow to a single circuit such as the Ninth Circuit, or to add specific courts, without losing the federal set.
Try a Federal Reporter cite, a case name, or plain English: securities fraud scienter Second Circuit. Boolean terms with /s and /p connectors work.
Every result shows court, date, citation, holdings, and good-law treatment. Read the text and download the official PDF.
Call the caselaw API with scope all_federal, or verify a citation list with POST /api/v1/citecheck/documents.
The official sources for federal opinions are PACER and the courts’ own sites. LawDiver holds a free searchable mirror of the federal corpus with full text, holdings, and PDFs, and the API exposes the same federal authorities for downstream use.
For connector syntax — AND, OR, /s, /p, w/n, phrases — read the search connectors and boolean operators guide. LawDiver is free legal research and a free Westlaw alternative, a cheap Westlaw alternative, a free Lexis alternative, and a cheap Lexis alternative for primary law.
The federal caselaw API is the LawDiver legal research API over the federal corpus. Search, retrieve, cite-check, and fetch PDFs for federal opinions from your own app, free during the current rollout. Base URL https://lawdiver.com/api/v1. Authentication is an API key in Authorization: Bearer …. See the legal research API and API docs. Responses are JSON with opinion metadata, holdings, text, and citation data.
cURL — all federal courts
curl -s https://lawdiver.com/api/v1/search/caselaw \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $LAWDIVER_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"query":"securities fraud scienter","scope":{"kind":"all_federal"},"searchType":"auto"}' | jqcURL — one federal circuit
curl -s https://lawdiver.com/api/v1/search/caselaw \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $LAWDIVER_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"query":"summary judgment standard","scope":{"kind":"all_federal","circuits":[9]},"searchType":"auto"}' | jqPython — federal search
import requests, os
r = requests.post("https://lawdiver.com/api/v1/search/caselaw",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['LAWDIVER_API_KEY']}"},
json={"query":"Daubert expert admissibility","scope":{"kind":"all_federal"},"searchType":"auto"})
print(r.json())To cite-check a brief against Federal Courts authorities, send it to POST /api/v1/citecheck/documents or paste into CiteCheck. To put Federal Courts caselaw into an AI agent, use the LawDiver MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor. For bulk licensing, see bulk data.
On LawDiver at /caselaw/federal. Search federal opinions by citation, case name, or legal issue, then read the full text and download the official PDF with no login.
Yes. LawDiver is a free Westlaw alternative and a free Lexis alternative for federal court opinions — Supreme Court, courts of appeals, and district courts — with full text and PDFs at no cost. It covers primary law; it does not include every commercial treatise.
Yes. Choose Federal only on /caselaw/federal, then pick a circuit such as the Second or Ninth Circuit in the jurisdiction control. The results are limited to that circuit plus the Supreme Court.
Type the citation into the search box on /caselaw/federal — for example, 547 U.S. 230 or 947 F.3d 135 — and the citation engine returns the opinion directly.
Yes. LawDiver runs semantic search over opinion text, so a plain-English description such as what is the standard for summary judgment in the Fifth Circuit returns federal cases that address it even when wording differs.
Yes. The LawDiver federal caselaw API is part of the legal research API at /docs/api and is free during the current rollout. Use scope all_federal; add circuits [9] to limit to one circuit. See /products/api.
Yes. CiteCheck at /products/citecheck and the API at POST /api/v1/citecheck/documents check a citation list or an entire brief against the live federal corpus.
Looking for operators? See the boolean search operators guide, or the API documentation.