Building a Legal Case Law Scraper with CourtListener

Introduction Legal research is tedious and expensive. Tools like Westlaw and LexisNexis charge thousands per year, but much of the same case law is publicly available through government court systems and open-source platforms like CourtListener. In this tutorial, we'll build a Python scraper that collects case law data for legal research and analysis. Setup import requests from bs4 import BeautifulSoup import pandas as pd import json import time from datetime import datetime # CourtListener has a free API, but for scraping court websites # you need robust proxy rotation # Get your API key: https://www.scraperapi.com?fp_ref=the52 SCRAPER_API_KEY = " your_key_here " BASE_URL = " http://api.scraperapi.com " # CourtListener API (free, requires token) CL_BASE = " https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest/v4 " CL_TOKEN = " your_courtlistener_token " Using the CourtListener API CourtListener provides a well-documented REST API: def search_opinions ( query , court = None , after_date = None ): ""