---
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.