Search federal court cases by party name and retrieve docket metadata via the PACER Case Locator (PCL) API
domain: pacer.uscourts.gov · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Authenticate via the PACER Authentication API and obtain your X-NEXT-GEN-CSO token (see authentication route)
Send a GET request to the PCL REST API search endpoint with query parameters for party name, court type, date range, or case type as documented in the PCL API User Guide
Parse the JSON response; PCL returns up to 54 results per page — use the page query parameter to paginate through additional results
For each matching case, extract the court identifier and case number to construct subsequent per-court docket queries
To retrieve full docket entries and documents, send authenticated requests to the individual court's CM/ECF system using the case number obtained from PCL
Log all lookups that trigger PACER per-page fees and implement circuit-breaking to prevent runaway charges in bulk processing loops
Known gotchas
PCL searches across federal courts but does not return documents; documents require separate requests to each court's CM/ECF system and incur per-page fees
Court identifiers in PCL responses must be mapped to the correct CM/ECF base URL for that specific district or circuit — there is no single universal CM/ECF endpoint
Sealed cases and restricted documents will appear as metadata stubs but document retrieval will return 403; do not treat a 403 as a transient error
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