CourtListener in More Places: What the HeinOnline Integration Signals for Open Legal Data
Last week, HeinOnline announced a new case law offering powered by CourtListener. We, at Free Law Project, see this announcement as part of a larger movement: open legal data is becoming recognized as a crucial foundation for legal research, education, and public engagement with the courts.
CourtListener has always been built as a public-first resource — a free, open, and continuously growing archive of court opinions, oral arguments, and docket information. Seeing it appear inside another major research environment is a reminder that open systems do not exist in competition with the legal ecosystem, but in support of it.
Why This Matters
The value of this integration is not about branding or distribution alone. It reflects something larger:
Open legal data is no longer optional.
Researchers, students, journalists, and practitioners increasingly expect comprehensive access to the law — not only to final opinions, but to context: dockets, parties, judges, and procedural history. CourtListener was built to make that context accessible, structured, and useful.
Open infrastructure scales.
CourtListener currently includes millions of judicial opinions and continues to grow every day. The technology and data behind it were designed from the beginning to support both public users and institutional use at scale. Integrations like this demonstrate that open systems can meet real-world research demands.
Access to law improves everywhere when data is open.
Whether someone encounters CourtListener through our own interface, an API, or an external platform, the outcome is the same: more people encountering law that is easier to search, analyze, and understand. Open data improves downstream tools, workflows, and research environments — even when users never see the infrastructure directly.
What This Says About the Future of Legal Research
For years, open legal data was treated as peripheral: useful, but separate from "serious" research environments. That distinction is fading.
Today, open data is no longer an experiment on the margins. It is part of the foundation on which many research systems are being built — powering search, fueling analytics, enabling AI tools, and supporting transparency across the legal system.
The increasingly visible role of projects like CourtListener reflects a broader truth: access to law does not depend on a single product or platform. It depends on shared infrastructure, maintained for the public good and available to everyone.
A Reminder — and a Call to Action
Integrations are milestones, not endpoints. CourtListener exists because thousands of contributors — librarians, court staff, journalists, technologists, and volunteers — have helped expand and improve it. The work continues every day: adding missing opinions, correcting metadata, improving coverage, and building better ways to organize the law.
If you use CourtListener through HeinOnline, directly on CourtListener.com, through our APIs, or through one of many downstream tools, you are part of that ecosystem.
And if you notice something missing — a case, a court, a document type — tell us. Open legal data is only as strong as the community that supports it.
At Free Law Project, we remain committed to building and maintaining public legal infrastructure that serves everyone — not just today's users, but tomorrow's as well.
