# Free Law Project *US nonprofit providing free legal-research tools and open legal data* Free Law Project is a nonprofit organization registered under section 501(c)(3) and based in Oakland, California.[^1] Its Wikipedia entry describes three areas of work: making primary legal materials freely available, building legal research tools, and supporting academic study of legal corpora.[^1] Michael Lissner and Brian Carver established the organization in 2013.[^1] Wikipedia lists four data-collection initiatives.[^1] - What it calls the largest collection of American oral-argument audio. - A daily intake of newly issued opinions from 200 U.S. courts and administrative bodies. - The RECAP Project, which gathers documents from the federal PACER system. - User-generated visualizations of Supreme Court citations. The same source states that in September 2021 the organization's database assisted *The Wall Street Journal* in reporting 138 cases of conflict-of-interest violations by federal judges.[^1] ## Services The organization's main site, CourtListener.com, offers court dockets, 900,000 minutes of oral-argument recordings, entries on more than eight thousand judges, and more than three million opinions.[^1] The site can be searched through the web and through an API.[^1] Its opinions can be searched by keyword or by semantic search and are cross-linked by a citator.[^1] The resulting citation graph is also available through an API.[^1] Wikipedia lists three further databases:[^1] - A judge and appointer database with biographical and electoral information on more than 16,000 American judges and appointors. - A database of more than 400 legal reporters. - Courts-DB, which covers more than 700 U.S. courts. According to the entry, all of the organization's work is open source and published online.[^1] ### RECAP RECAP is software for users of PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), the fee-based online database of U.S. federal court documents.[^1] While a user searches PACER, the software checks for free copies of the documents. It also contributes to a free alternative collection hosted at the Internet Archive and on CourtListener.[^1] For each PACER document, it first checks whether another user has already uploaded it.[^1] Wikipedia records that a team from Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy and Harvard University's Berkman Center built the software in 2009.[^1] Free Law Project now maintains it.[^1] The name is "PACER" reversed.[^1] RECAP is distributed as an extension for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari.[^1] ## Notes [^1]: Wikipedia contributors, *Free Law Project* (revision 1374973361, retrieved 2026-10-26) — the organization's status, location, founding, initiatives, CourtListener and database figures, the September 2021 *Wall Street Journal* item, and RECAP's origin, function and distribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Law_Project