How to Find Federal Court Opinions: Free Sources, PACER, and What Each One Misses

To find federal court opinions, start with the free official sources: govinfo's United States Courts Opinions collection for appellate, district, and bankruptcy opinions back to about 2004, CourtListener for the broadest full-text archive, each circuit's own website for the newest filings, and supremecourt.gov for Supreme Court slip opinions. PACER holds dockets and filings rather than research material, and written judicial opinions on PACER are free no matter how long they are. What none of the free sources give you is a citator, so nothing you pull from them is verified until you check its subsequent treatment separately.

Federal research has an unusual shape. The opinions themselves are public and mostly free, which surprises lawyers who came up assuming everything lived behind a Westlaw login. The expensive part was never retrieval. It is knowing which of the ninety four districts and thirteen circuits your answer has to come from, whether the opinion you found binds anyone, and whether it survived the last five years. This walks through where the opinions actually live, what each source covers, and the two checks that make the difference between finding a case and being able to cite it.

Where can I find federal court opinions for free?

There are four sources worth knowing, and they overlap enough that most researchers only need two of them. The government publishes opinions through govinfo, the Free Law Project publishes a larger archive with better search, the courts post their own newest opinions first, and the Supreme Court runs its own site. Coverage and search quality differ sharply, so pick by what you are doing rather than by habit.

One change is worth knowing because a lot of older guidance is now wrong about it. Harvard's Caselaw Access Project, which digitized roughly forty million pages of American case law, wound down its own search and API in 2024. The Free Law Project integrated the full CAP collection into CourtListener that March, and Harvard continues to host the bulk data at case.law for researchers who want the raw files. If you bookmarked CAP's search years ago, the live successor is CourtListener.

How do I find a federal case if I only have the citation?

Read the citation first, because it tells you which court decided the case and therefore where to look. In a federal cite, the reporter abbreviation is the tell. F.4th means a court of appeals opinion issued from 2021 onward, F.3d covers 1993 to 2021, and F.2d runs earlier than that. F. Supp. 3d, F. Supp. 2d, and F. Supp. are district court opinions. U.S., S. Ct., and L. Ed. all point to the Supreme Court. So 598 F.4th 112 (9th Cir. 2024) tells you, before you search anything, that you want a recent published Ninth Circuit opinion.

Then use a citation lookup rather than a keyword search. CourtListener has a citation lookup that resolves a reporter cite straight to the opinion, and Google Scholar generally finds a reported federal case if you paste the full citation in quotation marks. Searching the case name alone is the slow way, especially for common party names like the United States or a large insurer. Our walkthrough of how to find a case by citation covers the parsing step in more detail, and how to read a legal citation breaks down what each element of the cite is telling you.

If the reporter cite does not resolve, the case may be too new to have one. Opinions get a slip form and a docket number before they get a reporter page, sometimes by a year or more. In that window you search by docket number on the deciding court's own site, or by party name plus date on CourtListener, and you cite the slip opinion with the court and the filing date.

What is the difference between PACER and a case law database?

PACER is a records system. It exists so the public can see what was filed in a federal case: the complaint, the motions, the exhibits, the orders, the docket entries showing what happened and when. It is organized by case, not by legal issue, and it has no concept of what a case stands for. You cannot ask PACER which circuit opinions have addressed a preemption question, because that is not the job it was built to do.

A case law database is organized around authority. It indexes opinions by their reasoning so you can find every decision on a point, and it layers a citator on top so you can see what happened to each one afterward. The two systems answer different questions, and the expensive mistake is using the first when you needed the second. Written opinions on PACER are free, which is genuinely useful, but pulling opinions one docket at a time is not research. We laid out the fee schedule in full in how much PACER costs, including the 30 dollar quarterly threshold below which you are never billed at all.

How do I find unpublished federal opinions?

Unpublished federal appellate dispositions are citable, and have been for two decades. Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 32.1 permits citing federal judicial opinions, orders, judgments, and other written dispositions designated as unpublished, not for publication, non-precedential, or the like, as long as they were issued on or after January 1, 2007. Circuits may not forbid it, though local rules still control the mechanics, such as whether you must attach a copy.

Finding them takes a little more work than finding published ones. West discontinued the Federal Appendix in 2021 after a twenty year run, so there is no longer a print reporter collecting unpublished circuit dispositions. In practice you look on the deciding circuit's own website, which posts unpublished dispositions alongside published ones, or on CourtListener, which carries both. Set an alert if the issue is live for you.

Being citable is not the same as being binding. An unpublished federal disposition is persuasive at best, and most circuits say so explicitly in their local rules. Cite one to show how a panel applied a rule to comparable facts, never as the foundation of an argument. The state side of the same question varies a lot more, and we work through it in whether you can cite an unpublished opinion.

How do I know whether a federal opinion is binding?

Weight follows the structure of the federal system, and the rules are cleaner than most state hierarchies. Supreme Court decisions bind every court in the country. A published opinion of a court of appeals binds the district courts inside that circuit and, under the prior panel precedent rule, later panels of that same circuit until the en banc court or the Supreme Court changes it. A district court opinion binds nobody at all.

That last point catches people out, because a well reasoned district opinion reads like authority. The Supreme Court addressed it directly in Camreta v. Greene, 563 U.S. 692 (2011), noting that a decision of a federal district court judge "is not binding precedent in either a different judicial district, the same judicial district, or even upon the same judge in a different case." Useful, quotable, persuasive, not controlling. Track which court decided your case before you build a brief around it, and see federal case law search for how the circuits and districts fit together.

One more wrinkle applies constantly in practice. In a diversity case, a federal court applies state substantive law under Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938), and its reading of that state law does not bind the state courts. A Ninth Circuit opinion interpreting Washington law is persuasive in a King County superior court, not controlling there. If your issue is a state law question that happens to be in federal court, the state authority is what you need, and our Washington case law search guide shows how that plays out in a state where the appellate divisions do not even bind each other.

How do I check that a federal opinion is still good law?

This is the step the free sources do not cover, and it is the one that ends careers when it gets skipped. Retrieval tells you a case exists and says what it says. Verification tells you whether anything since has overruled it, abrogated it, limited it to its facts, or superseded the statute it construed. An opinion can be untouched on its own page and dead in practice because the en banc court reversed course three years later.

The paid citators, Shepard's and KeyCite, exist for exactly this and remain the deepest option for complex appellate work. The lighter version of the same check is to read the cases that have cited yours since it issued and look for negative language, which is what a treatment signal automates. Whichever route you take, do it before you file, not after opposing counsel does it for you. Our guide to checking whether a case is still good law walks the workflow, and citation check shows how we surface treatment alongside each result.

Alerts help here too. CourtListener will email you when a new opinion cites a case or matches a saved search, which turns verification from a task you remember to do into one that arrives in your inbox. The same instinct applies outside the courthouse: if you need to know the moment a client or an opposing party surfaces in new coverage or on social platforms, that is a web and social monitoring problem rather than a legal research one, and mixing the two into one manual routine is how both get done badly.

A working routine for federal research

Put the pieces in order and federal research stops being a scavenger hunt. Identify the court whose law governs, which for a federal question means your circuit and for a diversity case means the state. Search the issue as a full question rather than a keyword string. Read the reporter cite to confirm the court and the year. Separate published from unpublished before you rely on anything. Then run the treatment check.

The free sources handle the first three steps well and the last two not at all. That gap, not access to the opinions, is what a research tool is actually selling in 2026, and it is why a solo practitioner can run a federal practice on free retrieval plus one modest subscription rather than an enterprise seat. If you are weighing what that should cost, we compare the market in how much legal research software costs.

Ask your federal question in the search box at the top of this page and read the controlling opinions, the holdings, and the treatment signal for yourself. Casesearch is a research accelerator, not legal advice, and every case it returns is one you should read before you cite.