/justia/opinions

POST /api/justia/opinions

Price: 5 credits

Get a U.S. Supreme Court opinion by citation (e.g. '347 U.S. 483'), volume/page or Justia opinion URL: case name, citation, decision and argument dates, the plain-language annotation (primary holding and facts), the official syllabus, the participating justices grouped by opinion type with the opinion author, and the full opinion and dissent text.

How to use it

Fetch one U.S. Supreme Court opinion by citation (e.g. '347 U.S. 483'), volume/page (e.g. '347/483') or Justia URL. Returns id, case_title, citation, court, volume, page, year, decided_at, argued_at, reargued_at (unix seconds), primary_holding, facts, syllabus, annotation, justices (name, opinion_type, is_author) and text (the full opinion body).

Parameters

• access-token string required

Request body

• timeout integer — Max scrapping execution timeout (in seconds) (default: 300; min: 20; max: 1500)
• opinion string required — U.S. Supreme Court opinion reference: citation (e.g. '347 U.S. 483'), volume/page (e.g. '347/483') or the Justia opinion URL (examples: "347 U.S. 483"; minLength: 1)

Response

• @type string (default: "JustiaOpinion")
• id string required
• case_title string required
• citation string nullable
• court string nullable
• volume integer nullable
• page integer nullable
• year integer nullable
• decided_at integer nullable
• argued_at array (default: [])
• reargued_at array (default: [])
• primary_holding string nullable
• facts string nullable
• syllabus string nullable
• annotation string nullable
• justices array (default: [])
  • @type string (default: "JustiaOpinionJustice")
  • name string required
  • opinion_type string nullable
  • is_author boolean (default: false)
• text string nullable
• url string nullable

Errors

• 422 — The request body did not validate Check the fields against this schema. A URN with the wrong prefix is the most common cause.
• 408 — The request ran past its time limit Raise `timeout` in the request body, up to the maximum this endpoint documents. Lowering `count` or turning off the `with_*` flags also helps, because less work finishes sooner.
• 412 — Opinion not found (well-formed citation with no Justia U.S. Supreme Court opinion) Retrying will not help: either the entity does not exist, or the input points at a different one.
• 429 — Too many requests: a rate limit or a usage window is exhausted When the response carries an X-Retry-After header, wait that many seconds and retry: the same number is in the body as `detail.retry_after`, and the limit clears once that window passes. The message in the body names the limit that was hit.
• 500 — Something broke on our side Retrying will not help. If it keeps happening, send us the X-Request-ID from the response headers.
• 529 — Rate limit reached, or the endpoint is overloaded Wait at least 30 seconds, then retry.

Response headers

• X-Error — Error message text (present only on error)
• X-Request-ID — Unique request identifier
• X-Execution-Time — Execution time in seconds
• X-Result-Count — How many records the body carries. 0 means an empty result, which is a normal answer and not by itself an error. A non-zero count can come back together with X-Error when the failure happened partway through — read this header and X-Error independently.
• X-Total-Available-Results — How many records exist for this query, when the endpoint can say. On a `dry_run` request this is the answer and the body is empty. It saturates: the endpoint's documented maximum means 'at least that many', any smaller number is exact.
• X-Warning — Present when the request body carried keys this endpoint does not document. They were ignored, so any filter you meant to apply through them did not apply. Check the spelling against this schema and retry.
• X-Retry-After — Seconds to wait before retrying. Present only on 429.