Release Notes

1.0.0 Production release

  • Statutes and Regulations (Out of beta!)

    • 🔄 More frequent data updates!
      Updated monthly: Federal, California, New York, Texas, Florida, and Delaware; other jurisdictions are updated quarterly

    • 🔍  Search a state jurisdiction with federal laws

      Search state and federal statutes and regs at the same time by using our new with_federal=true parameter

    • 🏎️ Lower latency search

      We've built a more powerful search cluster and tuned our API to improve response times for search and API queries

    • 📜 Coming soon: Constitutions and Court Rules

      Adding Constitutions and additional coverage for standalone court rules and civil procedures that are not part of statutes

    • 🖥️  Coming soon: Improvements for building web interfaces

      Improvements to make hierarchical law easier to navigate and build user interfaces; pre-rendered HTML within the API

    Case Law (in Beta)

    • 🔖 Keyword search or citation lookup
      Over 10.3M case opinions are available to query by Bluebook citation and BM25 keyword search through a relationship with CourtListener

    • 🏛 Filter by jurisdiction or individual courts
      By customer request, we've prioritized adding additional ways to filter

    • ⚡ Filter by a federal circuit
      We'll search all courts within the circuit for you by passing in  the circuit number, e.g., courts=first_circuit or courts=federal_circuit

    • 🔍 Search state opinions alongside federal opinions
      One search works across a state jurisdiction and federal courts

    • Next up: Hybrid search and citation graphs with statutes and regulations

0.3.1 Published Case Law Opinion

  • Retrieve published case law opinion metadata and text by Bluebook citation

0.2.0 Full-text Search

  • Added simple-search, a web-like heuristic search with configurable or, and, and exact phrase searching. This search is recommended for most use cases and customers.

  • ⚠️ Break change: Some search endpoints were moved to better represent the object being returned.

    • /jurisdictions/ID/simple_search is now /jurisdictions/ID/divisions/simple_search

    • /jurisdictions/ID/keyword_search is now /jurisdictions/ID/divisions/keyword_search

  • This interactive API documentation! Click the API Reference tab to try it out.

0.1.1 Added Keyword Search

  • Initial version of keyword search against law names, law text, and annotations

0.1.0 LegalWeek Beta Launch

  • OpenLaws API Launch with lookup by Bluebook Citation and hierarchical querying