Look up a federal judge's biographical profile, court appointments, and political affiliation using the CourtListener People API
domain: www.courtlistener.com · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
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Steps
Authenticate to CourtListener using 'Authorization: Token YOUR_TOKEN'
Query GET https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest/v4/people/ with filters such as name_last, name_first, or educations__school__name__contains to narrow to the target judge
Each person object includes fields for political_affiliations, positions (court appointments with dates), educations, and aba_ratings
To retrieve the judge's authored opinions, use the related opinions endpoint filtering by author_id using the person ID returned from the people endpoint
Send an OPTIONS request to /api/rest/v4/people/ to enumerate all available filter fields and their accepted values
Known gotchas
The people endpoint covers judges and justices but attorney data is less comprehensive; for attorney lookups, cross-reference the parties and attorneys fields in docket records
Political affiliation data is sourced from public records and may be incomplete for lower-court or recent appointees
A judge may have multiple position records across different courts and time periods; iterate through all position objects to build a complete appointment history
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