The Google Scholar Case Law API turns Google Scholar's free US case law search into structured JSON. Send a query like "qualified immunity" with optional court and year filters, and get back court opinions with party names, deciding court, decision date, reporter citation, cited-by count, and the list of cases each opinion cites. It is built for legal researchers, litigation support teams, and developers doing citation analysis or wiring real precedent into AI agent workflows.

A search hit is the light record. Pass its result_id back through caseIds, or set fetchCaseDetailsForResults to true, and you get the full case detail including every case the opinion cites. That second layer is what makes citation-graph work possible. Billing is pay-per-event: half a cent per search result and one cent per full case detail, so a 20-result search-only run costs about a dime.

Example Tasks and Use Cases

Find Ninth Circuit opinions on qualified immunity - scope a national search to one circuit with a single court code.

Find Supreme Court cases citing Chevron deference - pair a doctrine query with the SCOTUS court code to trace how a standard evolved.

Export case law search results to CSV - the no-code path: run the search and download the dataset as a spreadsheet.

Search US case law with a free API - the cheapest possible run, covered by Apify's free platform credit.

US trade secret case search - localize the interface for Chinese-speaking researchers studying US trade secret disputes.

US patent infringement case law - the same localized search for patent litigation precedent.

Do legal research in Claude with a case law MCP - connect the Actor as an MCP tool so an agent can cite real opinions.

Works with MCP

Apify exposes the Actor over the Model Context Protocol, so Claude, Claude Code, and Cursor can call it as a tool. An agent can search a doctrine, pull the full detail on the top hit, and ground its answer in opinions that actually exist instead of hallucinating a citation. Ask "find Ninth Circuit qualified immunity cases since 2015" and it returns structured rows, no scraping code.

Honest limits

This is a research tool that returns what Google Scholar indexes. It reports citations and cited-by counts but not editorial treatment, so it will not tell you a case was overruled the way a paid citator does. Coverage of very recent or very obscure opinions depends on Scholar's own indexing. Treat the output as research input, not legal advice.

Keywords and Topics

case law api, legal research api, US court opinions, citation analysis, case law scraper, google scholar case law, SCOTUS opinions JSON, court decisions API, legal data for AI agents, MCP legal research tool.