Courts Database

Our Courts Database is a Python library or JSON file that provides structured information about nearly every American court, past or present.
Active
In Oakland, California
Open-source

The database has two main purposes. The first is to provide a unified list of court names and identifiers to make legal tools more interoperable. Second, is to use regular expressions to normalize court names into those identifiers.

Using this tool, you can take an unstructured string describing a court and convert it to an identifier you can trust.

The Courts Database was tested against sixteen million court strings, has over 700 court identifiers, and uses over 2,100 hand-crafted regular expressions to do its work.

The Courts Database is written in Python, but is available as JSON or can easily be extended to other languages.

Parent organization:

Free Law Project

Courts Database
Org. type: Non-profit / charity / foundation
Project type: Database
Last modified: Nov 12, 2025 Added: Nov 19, 2024
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