What public databases index federal civil dockets and how complete are their records (e.g., CourtListener vs. PACER)?
Executive summary
Federal civil dockets are indexed primarily in the judiciary’s official PACER system and in several public and commercial aggregators; PACER is the authoritative, court-maintained source but charges per-page fees and is distributed across individual court systems [1] [2]. Free alternatives—most notably CourtListener’s RECAP Archive—collect millions of PACER documents contributed by users and provide broad but not perfectly up-to-the-minute coverage, while commercial services (Lexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg, CourtLink) license PACER-origin data and often claim full federal docket coverage behind paywalls [3] [4] [5] [6].
1. PACER: the official record, fragmented by court and gated by fees
PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is the federal judiciary’s electronic public access service and the primary repository for district, appellate, and bankruptcy court filings; records are submitted through local CM/ECF systems so each court maintains its own database and URL, meaning PACER’s interface aggregates but the underlying systems are jurisdictional [1] [2]. PACER charges for document views and downloads (capped per document pages with a $3 cap and a $0.10 minimal charge for no matches) though the judiciary waives fees for users who accrue $30 or less in a quarter and offers free access points (public terminals, and fee-exemptions for qualified researchers) [1] [7].
2. CourtListener/RECAP: the biggest free open collection, but user-dependent
CourtListener, operated by Free Law Project, hosts the RECAP Archive—a searchable collection of millions of PACER documents harvested when users download PACER filings via RECAP browser extensions—making it the largest open collection of federal court data on the internet and containing hundreds of millions of docket entries and millions of documents according to CourtListener [3] [4]. That breadth, however, comes with caveats: RECAP depends on voluntary contributions and on what users have purchased on PACER, so while it covers “nearly every federal case” in aggregate claims, individual dockets may be incomplete or not updated in real time and will link back to PACER when a document is missing [4] [8].
3. Commercial aggregators: paid convenience and claims of completeness
Major legal publishers and services (Lexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg, CourtLink) have integrated federal dockets into their platforms and assert full or “same data as PACER” federal docket coverage; these vendors offer normalized interfaces, alerting, and integrated research tools that can be more user-friendly for litigation tracking but sit behind subscription paywalls and may include additional state-court content of variable coverage [5] [6]. University and law library guides commonly point practitioners to these paid products for their breadth and for cleaned metadata, while cautioning that PACER remains the primary source if absolute completeness and the original filings are required [9] [5].
4. Completeness: what “complete” means and where gaps appear
Completeness can be parsed two ways: metadata coverage (case existence, parties, docket entries) and document-level completeness (every PDF and filing). The Federal Judicial Center’s Integrated Database supplies metadata about federal cases and is used by aggregators, but not all public APIs populate every field for every case and some CourtListener endpoints are limited to select datasets or court types (e.g., bankruptcy) [10] [11]. RECAP/CourtListener can show “the latest version of the docket that it has” but cannot guarantee it mirrors PACER’s live state; conversely, PACER contains the court’s current filings but is physically distributed across court systems and subject to fee and access constraints [8] [1] [4].
5. Practical advice inferred from sources: choose by need, not myth
For authoritative, up-to-date filings and to obtain documents that a court has just posted, PACER is the source of record and the route to any filing not yet picked up by third-party archives [1] [2]; for free research, CourtListener/RECAP offers the largest open dataset and useful APIs but researchers should expect occasional gaps or staleness and be prepared to pull missing items from PACER [4] [3] [8]. For institutional research, subscription services deliver consolidated metadata, alerts, and cross-jurisdiction functionality that many law libraries recommend, but those services mirror PACER-origin data and do not replace the official docket when exact provenance or the latest filing matters [5] [6].