Search case law
search_casesFull-text search over 10.7M U.S. court opinions (all states + federal, via syfert.com). Call this to find case law on a topic, locate a case by name, or find cases citing a statute. Routing: a proposition or quoted language -> find_authority (pasted verbatim); a doctrine name or fact pattern -> find_issues; a party name, statute number or keywords -> search_cases. Each hit carries bluebook and url (snippet up to 240 chars); a hit whose snippet quotes an earlier case carries passage_origin, the case to cite for that language. A q that is one citation or an "X v. Y" caption naming one case decisively also returns that case as direct_hit above the results (find_case does only that lookup). Query syntax: boolean AND/OR/NOT, "exact phrases", proximity (term1 w/5 term2), wildcards (neglig*), and field filters inside q (name:, judge:, syllabus:). Statute-style numbers like 83.49 are matched as citations to that statute. total may be null: a court or date filter makes the exact count too expensive to compute, and total_pages + total_note then carry the scale. partial: true means the time budget was hit; see partial_note. tier names the caller's plan; _source names the backend that served the search: xeric = the dedicated index, cloud = the cloud index behind a short queue. When no opinion holds every word of a long query, the answer may carry relaxed=true with relaxed_note and relaxed_terms_kept / relaxed_terms_dropped: its rows (closest_match) hold only the kept words. A q that is an "X v. Y" caption also lists, first on page 1, the decisions whose caption carries both parties (abbreviations and agency acronyms read: "Stone v. INS", "ANR Pipeline Co. v. FERC"), marked matched_by caption; the ranked rows follow unchanged. semantic: true ranks opinions by MEANING instead of words (a paraphrased fact pattern finds cases that share none of its words; rows carry similarity, no snippet; state, court, date and status=published filters apply); a text search with no hits is retried that way automatically (semantic_fallback: true).
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| q | Yes | Search query. Examples: "premises liability" AND negligence; name:miranda; 768.28 sovereign immunity | |
| page | No | Page number, default 1 | |
| sort | No | Default relevance (authority-weighted). | |
| court | No | Court id filter, comma-separable, trailing * for prefix. E.g. fla* (all Florida), scotus, ca11, fladistctapp1. Also takes a group token covering a whole set of courts: us-circuits, us-districts, us-bankr, fl-fed-districts, fed-veterans, fed-military, fed-immigration, fed-taxtrade, tribal-navajonation, tribal-cherokee. Use find_court to resolve either. Takes precedence over state. | |
| judge | No | Judge name filter | |
| state | No | Two-letter state code (fl, tx, ny, ca ... all 50 states + dc). Scopes the search to that state's OWN courts — supreme, appellate, circuit and county. Federal district and bankruptcy courts sitting in the state count as federal here, not as state courts, so they are excluded; add them with the court argument. Ignored if court is also given. | |
| status | No | published or unpublished | |
| compact | No | true = shorter rows (bluebook, url, date_filed, cited_by, status if not published, treatment flag and red/yellow counts, snippet, holding, passage_origin); default false | |
| date_to | No | YYYY-MM-DD | |
| per_page | No | Results per page, default 10, max 20 | |
| semantic | No | true = rank by meaning (whole-opinion embeddings) instead of matching words; q is then plain language, not boolean syntax. Default false. | |
| date_from | No | YYYY-MM-DD |