The University of Alabama School of Law
The University of Alabama School of Law
RECAP, a product of CourtListener, is a free legal research website that contains millions of legal opinions from a variety of courts with the intention of building a free and open repository of public court records. . It is a free extension for Firefox, Chrome and Safari that is used to capture documents from PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), a fee-based electronic public access service that allows users to obtain case and docket information online from Federal Appellate, District and Bankruptcy Courts.
The main page for the RECAP archive provides the researcher with many filtering options and examples of searching operators that you can use to help find what you're looking for. It is recommended that users take advantage of the filters when possible because a general search will pull from all available jurisdictions, which might return too many results.
Not every document will be available but they make it easy to differentiate between those that are free to download and which you may need to purchase from PACER to access. The case will look something like the example below. Those documents that are available for free will have a "Download PDF" option, while those that cost will have a "Buy on PACER" link.
