Register at case.law for a free API key to access full opinion text; without a key, full text is rate-limited to a small number of cases per day
Query GET https://api.case.law/v1/cases/?jurisdiction=JURISDICTION_SLUG&decision_date_min=YYYY-MM-DD&decision_date_max=YYYY-MM-DD&full_case=true with the Authorization header 'Token YOUR_KEY'
Use the jurisdiction slug values listed at https://api.case.law/v1/jurisdictions/ (e.g., 'tex' for Texas, 'ny' for New York) to filter by state
Paginate through results using the next URL returned in each response until next is null
For bulk access to large jurisdiction corpora, request access to the bulk download files at case.law rather than paginating through the API
Known gotchas
The CAP dataset covers published decisions through approximately 2020 when digitization funding ended; it is not a real-time source for recent opinions
Full case text in the API response is gated behind authentication even for in-copyright-free historical cases; always include the Authorization header
The bulk data files are compressed and structured as JSONL; ensure your pipeline handles newline-delimited JSON rather than a JSON array
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