Free Illinois caselaw search on LawDiver. Find Illinois opinions, read full text, download official PDFs, and search the Illinois caselaw API. Browse all guides · Illinois research guide
Search Illinois caselaw for free on LawDiver. This page searches Illinois state courts — the Illinois Supreme Court and its appellate courts — with an option on the search form to add related federal authority (District Court, C.D. Illinois, District Court, D. Illinois, District Court, E.D. Illinois, District Court, N.D. Illinois and the Seventh Circuit, plus the U.S. Supreme Court). Type a citation or case name for a known decision, or describe the legal issue in plain English and let semantic search find opinions that address it. Every opinion opens to full text with citation data, holdings, and the official court PDF. No subscription and no login.
Illinois coverage centers on the Illinois Supreme Court and its intermediate appellate courts, plus the related federal courts when that scope is chosen. Search is over full opinion text with Boolean, citation, case-name, and semantic engines. Federal district coverage adds 5 district court(s) sitting in Illinois. Each result shows the official citation, court, date, holdings, and a link to the court PDF.
Related federal coverage is available on the same form: the search can include District Court, C.D. Illinois, District Court, D. Illinois, District Court, E.D. Illinois and the Seventh Circuit, plus the U.S. Supreme Court, when the scope is set to “Illinois and related federal courts.” Search all federal cases instead · Search Supreme Court cases.
LawDiver legal research API·API docs·Illinois caselaw API·Search connectors·MCP server·CiteCheck
Find a Illinois opinion by citation or by describing the issue.
This page is pre-set to Illinois courts only. The jurisdiction chip should read Illinois. Switch it to “Illinois and related federal courts” when you also need federal district, circuit, and Supreme Court authority over that state.
Examples: a regional reporter cite, illinois supreme court qualified immunity, or landlord duty to mitigate. Boolean, phrase, and proximity connectors work; the rules are at /docs/search-connectors.
Open a hit to read the full text with citation, date, court, holdings, and treatment signals, and download the official court PDF.
Save the result set for AI grounding, or query the caselaw API with scope state_only and states [IL] to automate the same search.
The official sources for Illinois opinions are the Illinois Supreme Court and its intermediate appellate courts. LawDiver mirrors those opinions for free search with full text, holdings, and official PDFs — no subscription and no login. Federal opinions that interpret Illinois law sit in this database too; include them by setting the scope to “Illinois and related federal courts.”
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.
Search nearby jurisdictions
The Illinois caselaw API lets you query the same Illinois corpus from your own app. It is the LawDiver legal research API filtered to Illinois — search, retrieve, cite-check, and download PDFs over the same ten million opinions the site searches, 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 — Illinois state courts only
curl -s https://lawdiver.com/api/v1/search/caselaw \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $LAWDIVER_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"query":"your search here","scope":{"kind":"state_only","states":["IL"]},"searchType":"auto"}' | jqcURL — Illinois plus related federal
curl -s https://lawdiver.com/api/v1/search/caselaw \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $LAWDIVER_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"query":"qualified immunity","scope":{"kind":"state_plus_federal","states":["IL"]},"searchType":"semantic"}' | jqFetch — Illinois caselaw API
const res = await fetch("https://lawdiver.com/api/v1/search/caselaw", {
method: "POST",
headers: { Authorization: "Bearer " + process.env.LAWDIVER_API_KEY, "Content-Type": "application/json" },
body: JSON.stringify({ query: "premises liability invitee", scope: { kind: "state_only", states: ["IL"] }, searchType: "auto" })
});
const data = await res.json();To cite-check a brief against Illinois authorities, send it to POST /api/v1/citecheck/documents or paste into CiteCheck. To put Illinois 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/illinois. Search Illinois opinions by citation, case name, or a plain-English description of the 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 Illinois court opinions, with full text and official PDFs at no cost and no subscription. It covers primary law reading and searching; it does not bundle every commercial treatise.
Open /caselaw/illinois and type the regional or official citation for that state. The citation engine finds the opinion directly and shows its official PDF and later treatment.
Yes. LawDiver runs semantic search over Illinois opinion text, so a plain-English question about the issue returns relevant opinions even when they use different wording. Boolean, phrase, and proximity search also work.
Yes. On /caselaw/illinois, switch the scope to “Illinois and related federal courts” to add the federal district courts sitting in Illinois, the Seventh Circuit, and the U.S. Supreme Court to the same result set.
Yes. Every Illinois opinion on LawDiver links to the official court PDF where available, and a selection of cases can be exported as one structured research PDF.
Yes. The LawDiver Illinois caselaw API is part of the legal research API at /docs/api and is free during the current rollout. Query with scope state_only and states [IL] for Illinois only, or state_plus_federal to include related federal courts. See /products/api and the code samples below.
Yes. CiteCheck at /products/citecheck and the API verifier check whether a Illinois citation is still good law against the live corpus.
Looking for operators? See the boolean search operators guide, or the API documentation.