U.S. Judges, Judicial Careers, and Court Opinions: A CourtListener Database Snapshot (2026-03-31) with Opinion Authorship and Appellate Case Linkage

Description

This record contains a relational research database on United States judges, judicial careers and court opinions, built from the CourtListener bulk release of 31 March 2026. CourtListener updates its data continuously but does not assign persistent identifiers to individual bulk snapshots. This deposit fixes one snapshot so that analyses can be cited and repeated against a defined version. The database has two parts. The core is a selection of 17 CourtListener tables covering courts, dockets, opinion clusters, opinions, citations, and biographical and career records for judges, including positions, education and political affiliations. It holds 10,745,929 opinion records. The html with citations field, which CourtListener recommends for decision text, is present for 99.86 per cent of them. The derived layer covers 1,472,533 opinion records from the 13 federal courts of appeals and records the result of an authorship-attribution procedure for each one. Recorded author gender is resolved for 555,297 opinions, and an individual judge is identified for 524,777 of them. A resolved gender means that all candidates in the best matching tier share the same recorded gender, while an…

Description from Zenodo, shortened.

Files (50)

• PART01public_search_opinion.csv.bz2.part018.4 GB
• PART02public_search_opinion.csv.bz2.part028.4 GB
• PART00public_search_opinion.csv.bz2.part008.4 GB
• BZ2deposit_opinion_author_attribution.csv.bz213 MB
• PART04public_search_opinion.csv.bz2.part048.4 GB
• PART03public_search_opinion.csv.bz2.part038.4 GB
• PART05public_search_opinion.csv.bz2.part055.7 GB
• BZ2public_search_docket.csv.bz23.9 GB
• BZ2deposit_fjc_appellate_raw_2008plus.csv.bz218 MB
• BZ2public_search_opinioncluster.csv.bz21.9 GB
• BZ2deposit_fjc_appellate_raw_1971to2007.csv.bz228 MB
• BZ2public_search_court.csv.bz279 kB
• BZ2public_search_opinionscited.csv.bz2477 MB
• BZ2public_recap_fjcintegrateddatabase.csv.bz2256 MB
• BZ2deposit_appellate_opinion.csv.bz271 MB
• BZ2public_search_opinion_joined_by.csv.bz25.9 kB
• TSVparts.tsv884 byte
• BZ2public_people_db_person.csv.bz2430 kB
• BZ2public_search_citation.csv.bz2122 MB
• SQLrelease_indexes.sql2.8 kB
• BZ2deposit_opinion_fjc_match.csv.bz232 MB
• BZ2deposit_opinion_case_covariates.csv.bz212 MB
• BZ2deposit_fjc_appellate_case.csv.bz229 MB
• BZ2deposit_opinion_author_attribution_diagnostics.csv.bz25.3 MB
• BZ2public_search_opinioncluster_panel.csv.bz24.8 MB
• BZ2deposit_opinion_author_party.csv.bz23.2 MB
• BZ2deposit_crosswalk_outcome.csv.bz2196 byte
• BZ2public_people_db_position.csv.bz2999 kB
• BZ2public_people_db_education.csv.bz2209 kB
• BZ2public_people_db_politicalaffiliation.csv.bz2127 kB
• BZ2deposit_judge_service.csv.bz282 kB
• TSVdata_dictionary.tsv35 kB
• BZ2public_people_db_school.csv.bz264 kB
• SQLrelease_schema.sql19 kB
• BZ2deposit_judge_biography.csv.bz246 kB
• BZ2public_people_db_person_race.csv.bz225 kB
• SHrestore_deposit.sh5.2 kB
• TSVmanifest.tsv5 kB
• SQL12_validate_restored_release.sql4.2 kB
• BZ2deposit_appellate_court_excluded.csv.bz22.9 kB
• BZ2deposit_crosswalk_case_domain.csv.bz2787 byte
• BZ2deposit_judge_court_name_map.csv.bz2434 byte
• BZ2deposit_judge_supplemental.csv.bz2348 byte
• BZ2deposit_appellate_court.csv.bz2325 byte
• BZ2public_people_db_race.csv.bz277 byte
• BZ2deposit_crosswalk_disposition.csv.bz2163 byte
• BZ2public_search_opinioncluster_non_participating_judges.csv.bz265 byte
• MDDATA_LICENSES.md1.5 kB
• MDREADME_DATA.md5.2 kB
• —SHA256SUMS4.8 kB

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