Where to read court opinions for free, state by state

The map

For 49 states we found a free, text-searchable source that reaches today for the highest court. 2 have free sources with gaps, and 0 have no free current source we could find. In 11 states (marked with a dot) the highest court’s own website refused our automated check. Pick a state for its courts, years and where else to look.

Looking for a federal court? See the federal courts.

Every state

How we checked

• We opened each court's own opinion pages and four free indexes (CourtListener, the Caselaw Access Project, Google Scholar and GovInfo) with an automated tool on November 7, 2026, and wrote down what it could read: the years listed, whether opinion text can be searched, and whether the site let it in.
• “Free and searchable” means we found, for the highest court, a free source with text search that reaches today: the court's own website, or CourtListener when its court record shows it collecting that court's opinions and, where we measured years, its newest opinion is within 120 days of its bulk snapshot. Years can chain across those sources and the Caselaw Access Project, which holds published opinions only up to about 2017 to 2020.
• “Gaps” means free sources exist but a stretch of years is missing, or none we found is both current and confirmed searchable. “Limited” means we found no free source showing that court's recent opinions.
• A dot on the map marks a state whose highest-court website refused our automated check that day. That does not mean the court hides its opinions, and a person using a browser may well get in. It is a gap in our check, not a verdict.
• Years marked “inferred” come from a description of the site, not from the site itself.
• A site that needs a script-enabled browser to list opinions could not be read by our tool, so its years and search are not measured.
• We did not check trial courts one by one. Our survey lists no free statewide source of trial-court opinions.

Check it yourself

These are the free indexes behind the map. Read them rather than trusting our summary of them.

• CourtListener

  Read by Corpus on November 7, 2026.

• Caselaw Access Project (Harvard)

  Read by Corpus on November 7, 2026.

• Google Scholar

  Read by Corpus on November 7, 2026.

• GovInfo (U.S. Courts Opinions)

  Read by Corpus on November 7, 2026.

Data: Corpus Open (open source). CourtListener bulk data (public domain), snapshot Sep 30, 2026.