| --- |
| license: cc0-1.0 |
| language: [en] |
| task_categories: [text-retrieval, automatic-speech-recognition] |
| size_categories: [100K<n<1M] |
| tags: [legal, law, oral-arguments, court-audio, transcripts, us-courts, public-domain, rag] |
| pretty_name: US Court Oral Arguments (metadata + transcripts) |
| configs: |
| - config_name: default |
| data_files: data/oa-part*.jsonl.gz |
| default: true |
| --- |
| |
| # US Court Oral Arguments -- metadata and transcripts |
|
|
| > **Code & tools:** [github.com/docketx](https://github.com/docketx) — [legal-scrambler](https://github.com/docketx/legal-scrambler) pseudonymises a case file on your own hardware before a frontier model sees it; [claude-for-legal](https://github.com/docketx/claude-for-legal) is the Claude Code plugin (`docketx-open-law`) that loads these datasets and checks citations against them. |
|
|
| ## Source & credit — Free Law Project / CourtListener |
|
|
| Every recording catalogued here was collected and catalogued by **CourtListener**, and this dataset is |
| sliced from the Free Law Project / CourtListener bulk export of **2026-06-30**. CourtListener is a |
| project of [Free Law Project](https://free.law) — a 501(c)(3) non-profit building free public access |
| to American law since 2010. They gathered the arguments; we reformatted the catalogue. Go to the |
| source: <https://www.courtlistener.com>. |
|
|
| **Free Law Project is a non-profit, and it is worth supporting: <https://free.law/donate/>.** |
| If this data is useful to you, credit Free Law Project and CourtListener too, and consider going |
| straight to the source: CourtListener runs its own |
| [API and MCP server](https://wiki.free.law/c/courtlistener/help/api). |
|
|
| **103,226 oral-argument recordings** from U.S. courts (federal appellate, state supreme and appellate, |
| and others), catalogued by the Free Law Project / CourtListener. This dataset holds the **metadata and |
| machine transcripts** -- case name, court, date, duration, the original court audio URL, and the |
| speech-to-text transcript where one exists -- NOT the multi-terabyte audio itself, which stays on each |
| court's media server (the download_url on every row). |
| |
| Sliced from the CourtListener bulk export of 2026-06-30. |
| |
| ## A row holds |
| Court, case name, docket, date argued, duration, the court download_url for the MP3, and the STT |
| transcript plus its status. Oral argument is a distinct legal source: it shows how the judges actually |
| probed the case, often revealing reasoning the written opinion omits. |
|
|
| ## Load it |
| ```python |
| from datasets import load_dataset |
| ds = load_dataset("docketx/oral-arguments-us") |
| ``` |
|
|
| Public-domain court records. Part of the DocketX open legal corpus (docketx.ai), alongside |
| docketx/us-caselaw and the per-jurisdiction docketx/us-caselaw-* sets. |
|
|
