Release Notes

1.1.1 Release

Deprecated Case Law search. We recommend using the CourtListener REST API: https://wiki.free.law/c/courtlistener/help/api/rest/v4/search

Non-breaking changes:

Richer examples have been added for Division, Opinion, and Court entities
Added to the Division model:
- display_ancestors - New display_ancestors field added to Division to help users render breadcrumbs or add context for an LLM for where the Division exists in the law's hierarchy.
- display_children - Children of the current Divison node which allows users to traverse the “tree” of Divisions
- web_view_url - A static webpage with a beautifully rendered view of the current Division which can be used a Copilot or Deep Research style citation.
Added “Get Specific Laws’s Root Divisions” query, to display root-level Divisions, e.g. Title documents. It is similar to the “Get Division by Jurisdiction and Path“ with a blank path parameter.
New jurisdiction_key, ex: "CA", field added for Division for convenience. Previously, users needed to parse law_key to get jurisdiction_key.

Future deprecations:

[DEPRECATION WARNING] Division effective_date will be deprecated in the next version. It will be replaced by two fields: effective_date = "1993-01-06...Infinity" will become effective_date_start = "1993-01-06" and effective_date_end = "Infinity"
[DEPRECATION WARNING] Law state will be deprecated in the next version. Use jurisdiction_key instead.

Breaking changes in Opinion model:

Fields renamed in Opinion:
- plaintext renamed to plaintext_content for consistency with Division
- jurisdiction renamed to jurisdiction_key for consistency with Division
Fields renamed in Court:
- jurisdiction renamed to jurisdiction_key for consistency with Division

Statutes and Regulations (Out of beta!)
- 🔄 More frequent data updates!
  Updated monthly: Federal, California, New York, Texas, Florida, and Delaware; other jurisdictions are updated quarterly
- 🔍 Search a state jurisdiction with federal laws

Search state and federal statutes and regs at the same time by using our new with_federal=true parameter

We've built a more powerful search cluster and tuned our API to improve response times for search and API queries

Adding Constitutions and additional coverage for standalone court rules and civil procedures that are not part of statutes

Improvements to make hierarchical law easier to navigate and build user interfaces; pre-rendered HTML within the API

Case Law (in Beta)

🔖 Keyword search or citation lookup
Over 10.3M case opinions are available to query by Bluebook citation and BM25 keyword search through a relationship with CourtListener
🏛 Filter by jurisdiction or individual courts
By customer request, we've prioritized adding additional ways to filter
⚡ Filter by a federal circuit
We'll search all courts within the circuit for you by passing in the circuit number, e.g., courts=first_circuit or courts=federal_circuit
🔍 Search state opinions alongside federal opinions
One search works across a state jurisdiction and federal courts
**Next up: **Hybrid search and citation graphs with statutes and regulations

0.3.1 Published Case Law Opinion

Added simple-search, a web-like heuristic search with configurable or, and, and exact phrase searching. This search is recommended for most use cases and customers.
⚠️ Break change: Some search endpoints were moved to better represent the object being returned.
- /jurisdictions/ID/simple_search is now /jurisdictions/ID/divisions/simple_search
- /jurisdictions/ID/keyword_search is now /jurisdictions/ID/divisions/keyword_search
This interactive API documentation! Click the API Reference tab to try it out.