RECAP / CourtListener
Free access to tens of millions of federal court documents. Browser extension archives PACER purchases and shares them publicly through CourtListener.
What should journalists know about RECAP / CourtListener?
PACER charges $0.10 per page for public records created by a publicly funded judiciary. Free Law Project built RECAP to fix that. Install the extension, and every PACER document you buy gets archived to CourtListener for anyone to find for free. The RECAP Archive now holds tens of millions of documents, hundreds of millions of docket entries, and nearly every federal case. CourtListener's v4 API crossed 100 million requests by mid-2025. The 2025 launch of RECAP Search Alerts — essentially Google Alerts for federal courts — is a genuine breakthrough for beat reporters: get notified the moment a person or organization appears in a new filing. Free Law Project won the 2025 AWS Imagine Grant ($150K) and the 2025 American Legal Technology Award for AI. They are building a Litigant Portal using Amazon Bedrock for AI-assisted court navigation, with pilot launches planned for September 2026. This is essential infrastructure for journalism and civic accountability.
Searching federal court records without PACER fees. Monitoring cases and people through docket alerts and RECAP Search Alerts. Building a growing public archive of court documents as you research. Accessing case law, oral arguments, judicial financial disclosures, and judge profiles. Bulk data access via API for data journalism projects.
State court records — RECAP covers federal courts only. Documents nobody has accessed through RECAP yet still require a PACER account (RECAP then archives them for others). The RECAP archive is broad but not complete; for guaranteed coverage of a specific filing, go to PACER directly. Alert system cannot handle high-volume queries (e.g., a search returning 200+ results/day will be rejected).
Security & Privacy
Data is scrambled while being sent to their servers
Data is scrambled when stored on their servers
Where servers are located — affects which governments can request your data
Privacy policy summary
Free Law Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The RECAP extension only activates on PACER and CourtListener domains — it does not track browsing elsewhere. Your PACER purchases are anonymously uploaded to the public archive. CourtListener accounts require email only. No data selling, no advertising, no user tracking.
How to protect yourself:
Documents you access on PACER with RECAP installed will be publicly archived. If you are researching sensitive dockets or building a story you don't want to telegraph, disable the extension temporarily. RECAP cannot access sealed documents — it lacks login credentials for ECF 'magic links' and never touches restricted content. On rare occasions, documents that should have been sealed by the court are inadvertently uploaded; Free Law Project works with courts to remove them quickly. If you use an ECF account instead of a PACER account, log in carefully — RECAP encourages PACER-only logins to avoid any risk of sharing restricted filings.
Open-source, nonprofit-operated, privacy-focused by design. The extension only activates on PACER/CourtListener domains and does not track users. Sealed documents are architecturally excluded — RECAP cannot access ECF magic links. Strong institutional commitment to open access, backed by 15+ years of operation, major foundation funding, and government adoption (1,000+ verified government users). The main risk is operational: your PACER activity feeds a public archive, which could reveal reporting interests to anyone monitoring new additions.
Who Owns This
Known issues
RECAP archive coverage depends entirely on what other users have purchased — if nobody has bought a specific document, it won't be in the archive. Alert system rejects broad queries that would generate 200+ results per day; narrowing by court or date range helps but doesn't always resolve it. Occasionally, improperly unsealed documents appear in the archive before courts fix their own errors; Free Law Project removes these but the window can expose sensitive information. The extension adds slight latency to PACER page loads while checking the archive. No mobile browser support — extension requires desktop Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari. CourtListener search can lag behind real-time PACER filings by hours or days depending on contribution patterns.
Pricing
Free. RECAP is a browser extension. CourtListener is a free search engine and API. PACER itself charges $0.10/page (capped at $3/document), but fees are waived if you accrue $30 or less per quarter. RECAP shares documents so others don't pay again.
This is an editorial assessment based on publicly available information as of 2026-04-02, using our published methodology. Independent security review is pending. Security posture can change at any time. This is not a guarantee of safety.
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