Case Citation Lookup
Check a court case against 10.07 million US opinions, 62,000+ Canadian federal decisions, and the CJEU judgments interpreting the EU laws we cover, all in Recording Law's own legal record. Type a US reporter citation (“114 Nev. 1176”), a Canadian neutral citation (“2012 SCC 45”), an EU case number or ECLI (“C-131/12”), or a case name; a real case resolves to its court, date, and the statutes it engages — with links to our plain-English guides on those laws. A citation that comes back not found deserves your suspicion.
What This Checks
The record holds 10.07 million opinion clusters from more than 3,000 US courts — the Supreme Court, the federal circuits and district courts, and state appellate courts — built from the Free Law Project's CourtListener corpus, which includes the Harvard Caselaw Access Project. It also holds more than 62,000 decisions of Canada's federal courts: the Supreme Court of Canada back to 1877, the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal, the Tax Court, and the Court Martial Appeal Court, reproduced under Canada's Reproduction of Federal Law Order (SI/97-5), and the judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union that cite or interpret the EU instruments in our statute record (GDPR, ePrivacy, DSA, and the consumer acquis), reproduced from EUR-Lex under Decision 2011/833/EU. Each result shows the case name, court, decision date, its citation where one exists, how many later opinions cite it, and the statutes in our legal record that the opinion engages. That last step is the connection you will not find in a bare case database: from any case, straight to our plain-English guides on the laws it interprets.
Why “Not Found” Matters
AI tools and low-quality websites routinely invent case citations that look perfectly real — courts have sanctioned lawyers for filing briefs built on them. A citation that fails to match anything in 10 million opinions is not proof the case is fake: it may be very recent, unpublished, or outside our coverage. But it is a strong signal to verify at the source before relying on it. Real cases leave records; this tool checks the largest open one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do the opinions come from?
From the Free Law Project’s CourtListener corpus, including the Harvard Caselaw Access Project — the largest open repository of US case law. Our record is a quarterly-updated copy; every result links back to CourtListener, where the full opinion text lives.
A citation I checked came back "not found." Is it fake?
Not necessarily — the case may be too recent for our latest update, unpublished in the reporters we index, or from a court outside the corpus, and typos in volume or page numbers break matching. But if the citation came from an AI tool or an unsourced website, treat "not found" as a serious warning and verify it on CourtListener or the court’s own website before relying on it.
What does "laws this case engages" mean?
We automatically detect which statutes in our 1.79-million-section legal record the opinion cites, and rank them by how often they appear in its text. It shows what law the case involves — it is not a statement of what the court held. For holdings, read the opinion itself.
Can I read the full opinion here?
No — every result links to CourtListener, the open-access repository where the full text lives. Our record stores the metadata and the case-to-statute connections that power this lookup and our articles.
Is this legal advice?
No. This is a research and verification tool. Whether a case is good law for your situation depends on jurisdiction, later history, and facts a lookup cannot assess. Consult a licensed attorney.
This tool checks Recording Law's own record of US case law, built from the open CourtListener corpus. It is general legal information, not legal advice, and “not found” is not proof a case does not exist. RecordingLaw.com is not a law firm and is not affiliated with any court or government body.
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