Where to Read the Supreme Court

Every volume of the U.S. Reports from the first decision in 1791 to last term, each case with the syllabus, every separate opinion, the docket number and the argument date. The workhorse for modern cases: 155 of the 156 case links on this site’s ideology pages point here.

Slip opinions the day they come down, the docket, the order lists, the Journal — and the U.S. Reports as PDFs back to volume 2. One distinction worth knowing: the full cover-to-cover bound volumes, with the orders and indexes, begin only at volume 502, October Term 1991.

The bound volumes as scanned books, 1–570, covering 1754 to 2012 — the official reports as printed, page images and all. The case-level index that makes it searchable was built by volunteers in 2016; bulk downloading is not permitted. This is where 232 of the 265 case links on our key-decisions page go.

Ten million opinions across hundreds of jurisdictions from the non-profit Free Law Project — the homepage advertises the 8.3 million precedential ones — with alerts, an API and quarterly bulk CSV drops. The best source if you want the data rather than the page.

Supreme Court opinions back to 1791 with a “How Cited” panel showing what cited what — deeper on this Court than on any other, since its federal appellate coverage starts only in 1923. One caution: “How Cited” is not a validating citator. It tells you who cited a case, not whether it is still good law.

Full text from 1990 — the year the Court began distributing decisions electronically — plus a hand-curated collection of 631 historic decisions, and opinions browsable by author. Shallower than it looks for older cases; unmatched for its student-written case previews.

The best thing on this list. Argument audio since 1955, aligned to the transcript sentence by sentence with every speaker identified — a job the official transcripts did not do, and which Oyez wrote software to do retroactively. Plus case summaries and profiles of the justices and the advocates. Rescued in 2016 by Cornell’s Legal Information Institute and Justia when its founder put it up for sale and a commercial buyer looked likely.

Transcripts back to October Term 1968, posted the same day since 2006. Audio, though, only reaches back to the 2010 term — and live streaming dates only from the telephone arguments of May 2020.

Where the early decades live. Record Group 267 holds argument audio from October 1955 onward — the whole Warren and Burger Courts, all of the Rehnquist Court and beyond, overlapping rather than stopping where the Court’s own postings begin. Fully digitised since 2023 and streamable from the catalog. If the Court’s site does not have a recording, this is where to look.

Harold Spaeth’s coding of every decision — issue, vote, direction, majority — case-centered or justice-centered, 1946 to 2024 in the modern file and 1791 to 1945 in the legacy file. Moved from Washington University to Penn State in 2024 and now directed by Michael J. Nelson. Every ideology figure on this site comes from here. Note the legacy file has not been re-released since 2021.

Epstein, Walker, Staudt, Hendrickson and Roberts: 245 coded variables per nominee — family background, religion, race, gender, prior career, confirmation, departure. Two things to know: it is a nominee file, not a justice file, so it includes people who never sat; and it was last released in October 2022, so it will not have anyone appointed since. Behind our demographics, born-poor and stepping-stones pages.

The dynamic ideal-point estimates — a justice’s ideology recomputed every term from their votes, so it moves as they move. October 1937 through October 2024, with the court median as a separate file. The measure behind every claim on this site about a justice drifting.

The Federal Judicial Center’s record of every judge presidentially appointed since 1789 — nomination, confirmation, commission and termination dates, education, prior career. Updated nightly, with a bulk export in CSV. The authority this site uses for judicial dates, and the reason our tenure figures do not match the ones that treat a death date as a service end.

Epstein, Martin, Segal and Westerland’s scaling of justices, appellate and district judges, Congress and the President into one policy space — the tool for asking whether the Court is out of step with the elected branches. Extended through 2024.

The personal papers of more than 35 justices — Frankfurter, Jackson, Black, Douglas, Brennan, Blackmun, Marshall, O’Connor — conference notes, draft opinions, letters between chambers. The finding aids are online and free. The papers are not: they are consulted in person in Washington, with a free reader card you must first collect in person. O’Connor’s 600 boxes opened in 2024, and her case files stop at October Term 1990 because the rest stay closed while a participating justice still sits.

The biggest change to free Supreme Court research in years: in April 2026 the Internet Archive published more than 125,000 records and briefs covering 1830 to 2019, donated by William & Mary’s Wolf Law Library. Petitions, merits and amicus briefs, lower-court records. Much of it had been reachable only in print, in a handful of law libraries, or through a subscription product.

Nineteen million digitised volumes from a partnership of 300-plus institutions, including full-view runs of the official reports and a great deal of nineteenth-century writing about the Court. Anyone can search everything and read public-domain works. The catch: Google-digitised public-domain books download one page at a time unless you are affiliated with a member library — or hold a Library of Congress reader card.

The National Archives’ edition of the founding-era papers — Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Franklin and, for our purposes above all, the seven volumes of the Selected Papers of John Jay. The primary source for the first Court: the circuit-riding complaints, the appointments nobody wanted.

Case-by-case coverage, argument recaps and the Stat Pack. Acquired by The Dispatch in 2025, which committed to “continue to offer its existing content to all readers at no cost” — a promise worth watching, since the parent site is subscription-funded.

Adam Feldman’s quantitative running commentary — who writes what, who agrees with whom, which advocates win. Cited on several pages here. Posting has become sporadic; much of his current output has moved to a Substack.

Objective previews of every argued case, written by Cornell law students before the argument: the question, both sides’ best arguments, what turns on it. There is no free equivalent, and a free email subscription delivers them.

Two seasons, 24 cases, 90 minutes each, made with the National Constitution Center — from Marbury to Bakke, with location filming and sitting justices talking on camera about the Court’s own history, which is rare given that cameras are still barred from the courtroom.

The single best free-access surprise on this page. The publisher sells it and marks it closed — but the Supreme Court Historical Society posts full-issue PDFs of its own journal, no login, from volume 15 (1990) through volume 49 (2024), plus a cumulative index. Thirty-five years of the leading journal on the Court’s history, one click deep. Only the last couple of years are genuinely locked.

The reason a paywall is rarely the end of the story. Self-archiving is the norm in legal academia, so an article locked behind a law review is very often posted free by its own author here under the same title. Owned by Elsevier; most papers are free, though publishers may charge for ones they post.

Archival runs of the political science and history journals where most quantitative work on the Court appears. A free personal account reads 100 articles every 30 days. Anything published more than 95 years ago is outside the meter entirely, which for early Court scholarship means the limit does not apply.

Image-scanned law reviews going back to volume one, plus a Supreme Court library of briefs and reports. Institutional, and Hein publishes no price. But the route worth trying is a state law library: Texas gives any resident a free account with remote access, while Pennsylvania restricts non-employees to a reading-room terminal. It varies entirely by state — check yours before assuming it is shut.

The two commercial giants: everything, annotated, with the citators that tell you whether a case is still good law — the one thing no free source provides. Thomson Reuters does publish an entry price for small firms; Lexis quotes. Either way there is a public door, and it is a physical one: Massachusetts, for instance, offers both free at all fifteen of its Trial Court Law Libraries, on site only. Patron access is authenticated by the building’s network, which is exactly why nobody can email you a login.