1.0.3 ReleaseCopied!

Non-breaking changes:

• Richer examples have been added for Division, Opinion, and Court entities

• Added to the Division model:

  • display_ancestors - New display_ancestors field added to Division to help users render breadcrumbs or add context for an LLM for where the Division exists in the law's hierarchy.

  • display_children - Children of the current Divison node which allows users to traverse the “tree” of Divisions

  • web_view_url - A static webpage with a beautifully rendered view of the current Division which can be used a Copilot or Deep Research style citation.

• Added “Get Specific Laws’s Root Divisions” query, to display root-level Divisions, e.g. Title documents. It is similar to the “Get Division by Jurisdiction and Path“ with a blank path parameter.

• New jurisdiction_key, ex: "CA", field added for Division for convenience. Previously, users needed to parse law_key to get jurisdiction_key.

Future deprecations:

• [DEPRECATION WARNING] Division effective_date will be deprecated in the next version. It will be replaced by two fields: effective_date = "1993-01-06...Infinity" will become effective_date_start = "1993-01-06" and effective_date_end = "Infinity"

• [DEPRECATION WARNING] Law state will be deprecated in the next version. Use jurisdiction_key instead.

Breaking changes in Opinion model:

• Fields renamed in Opinion:

  • plaintext renamed to plaintext_content for consistency with Division

  • jurisdiction renamed to jurisdiction_key for consistency with Division

• Fields renamed in Court:

  • jurisdiction renamed to jurisdiction_key for consistency with Division

1.0.0 Production releaseCopied!

• 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