How to Look Up Federal Court Cases: A Practical Guide

To look up a federal court case, start with the free official sources: govinfo publishes written opinions from federal appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts with no account required, and CourtListener carries a very large free collection plus the RECAP archive of documents pulled from PACER. Use PACER itself when you need the docket or a filing rather than the decision. PACER charges 0.10 dollars per page, capped at 3.00 dollars per document, waives fees entirely if you spend 30 dollars or less in a quarter, and court opinions are always free. This is informational, not legal advice.

There are two very different tasks people call "looking up a federal case," and mixing them up is why the search feels harder than it should be. One is finding a specific case you can already name. The other is finding whatever federal authority governs a legal problem you are trying to solve. The first is a lookup and takes two minutes for free. The second is research, and it is where the free tools stop helping.

Where federal court decisions actually live

govinfo. The Government Publishing Office publishes opinions from federal appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts at govinfo.gov. You can browse by court, by date, or search by keyword without registering. If you want the court's written decision and nothing else, this is the fastest official route.

CourtListener. A nonprofit free legal research site run by the Free Law Project, carrying millions of opinions from federal and state courts, including one of the largest free collections available anywhere. Its RECAP Archive holds documents that users have already purchased from PACER and contributed back, which means a lot of federal filings are readable there at no cost. It also has an API, which matters if you need bulk access rather than one case at a time.

PACER. Public Access to Court Electronic Records is the federal judiciary's official system for dockets and filed documents from appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts. It is the authoritative source for the case file, not just the decision. You need a free account, and the PACER Case Locator lets you search across courts when you do not know where a case was filed.

The individual court websites. Every federal court publishes its own opinions, and the circuit sites in particular post decisions promptly. If you want today's Ninth Circuit opinions, the court's own site is the primary source.

Google Scholar. Free, carries federal and state opinions, and shows basic citing references. Useful for reading, not sufficient for validation.

What does PACER cost?

This is the question that stops people, and the official numbers are more forgiving than the reputation. Per the PACER fee guidance, access to case records costs 0.10 dollars per page, you are never charged more than 3.00 dollars per document, and audio files are 2.40 dollars each. Crucially, fees are waived if you spend 30 dollars or less on court records in a quarter, and court opinions are always free.

In practice, that means an occasional user of PACER usually pays nothing. If you are pulling written opinions, they are free by rule. If you are pulling dockets and exhibits on a handful of matters a quarter, you are likely under the waiver threshold. Heavy litigation practices with document-intensive discovery are a different story, and that is where the RECAP archive saves real money by letting you check whether someone has already paid for the document you need.

How to look up a federal case when you know the name

1. Search CourtListener or govinfo for the case name. If it is a published opinion, you will usually have the full text in under a minute at no cost.
2. Confirm the court and the date. Case names repeat constantly, and the same parties often generate a district decision, an appeal, and sometimes a remand. Make sure you have the one you actually want.
3. Get the citation right. You need the reporter citation for a brief, not a URL. Our guide to how to cite a case covers the format.
4. Go to PACER if you need the file. Motions, orders, exhibits, and the docket sheet live in PACER, not in the opinion databases. Use the PACER Case Locator if you are unsure which court holds it.

How to find federal cases when you do not know the name

This is the hard one, and it is worth being blunt: the free databases are built around documents, not issues. They match the words you type against the words in an opinion. Judges do not write using the phrasing you would use to describe your client's problem, so keyword search on a free site turns into a guessing game where you cannot tell whether an empty result means no authority exists or that you picked the wrong words.

Three approaches that work better:

• Work backward from one good case. Find any decision that is roughly on point, then read what it cites and find what has cited it. Precedent is a network, and one solid entry point usually opens the rest.
• Use an issue-based search. Describing the legal question in plain English and getting back on-point decisions with the holding surfaced skips the keyword guessing entirely. That is exactly what federal case law search on Cases does, for a published 29 dollars per month.
• Use a classification system. The commercial platforms index cases by point of law, which is what the West Key Number System is for. It is genuinely useful and genuinely proprietary, and it is one of the real arguments for paying for Westlaw legal research.

If you need federal opinions in bulk rather than one at a time, say for a dataset or an internal tool, CourtListener's API is the right starting point, and the general problem of turning scattered public web sources into clean structured data you can actually query is worth solving once rather than scraping ad hoc every time you need a new slice.

Which circuit binds you, and why it decides your search

Federal trial cases are heard in 94 judicial districts. Appeals go to 13 courts of appeals: the 12 regional circuits plus the Federal Circuit, which hears subject-matter appeals such as patent cases. The Supreme Court sits above all of them.

A published decision from your own circuit binds the district courts within it. A decision from another circuit is persuasive only, however well reasoned, and treating it as controlling is an easy way to lose a judge's confidence. District court decisions bind no one, not even other judges in the same district. So filter by court before you filter by keyword. We go deeper in binding vs persuasive precedent, and the state-court interaction is covered in state vs federal case law.

The step people skip: is the case still good law?

Finding the decision is half the job. Confirming it has not been reversed, overruled, or seriously criticized is the other half, and none of the free sources really does it. Google Scholar shows you citing references but will not tell you what those citations mean. CourtListener has citation lookup, not full treatment analysis.

Validation is what a citator is for: KeyCite on Westlaw, Shepard's on LexisNexis, Authority Check on Fastcase and vLex. Before you assume you need to buy one, check your state bar, because a large number of US bars include a Fastcase or vLex library in your dues. Our citator comparison covers every option, what each costs, and the published research on how much negative treatment each one misses, which is more than you would hope.

One last thing, and it matters more every year: never file a citation you have not opened and read. Generative AI tools have produced confident references to decisions that do not exist, and lawyers have been sanctioned for filing them. See AI hallucinations in legal cases. Whatever tool you use, ours included, the citation is your responsibility.

PACER fees are quoted from the official PACER pricing guidance as of July 2026. Free-source coverage varies by court and year. Informational research, not legal advice, and always verify a citation before you rely on it.