Datasets:

docketx
/

us-judges

license: cc0-1.0
language:
  - en
task_categories:
  - text-retrieval
  - tabular-classification
tags:
  - legal
  - law
  - judges
  - judiciary
  - us-courts
  - public-domain
  - judicial-analytics
pretty_name: US Judges (CourtListener people database)
configs:
  - config_name: judges
    data_files: data/judges/judges.jsonl.gz
    default: true
  - config_name: positions
    data_files: data/positions/positions.jsonl.gz
  - config_name: educations
    data_files: data/educations/educations.jsonl.gz
  - config_name: schools
    data_files: data/schools/schools.jsonl.gz
  - config_name: political_affiliations
    data_files: data/political_affiliations/political_affiliations.jsonl.gz

US Judges — the CourtListener people database

Code & tools: github.com/docketx — legal-scrambler pseudonymises a case file on your own hardware before a frontier model sees it; 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

This dataset is the CourtListener people database, taken from the Free Law Project / CourtListener bulk export of 2026-06-30. CourtListener researched, assembled and maintains these judge records; Free Law Project — the 501(c)(3) non-profit behind it, building free public access to American law since 2010 — pays for it. We reformatted; they did the hard part. 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.

Structured records of U.S. judges: who they are, every judicial position they have held, where they studied, and their political affiliations. From the Free Law Project / CourtListener bulk export of 2026-06-30, public domain.

config	rows
`judges`	16,191
`positions`	51,291
`educations`	12,777
`schools`	6,011
`political_affiliations`	8,486
`retention_events`	0 — empty at source, so it is not offered as a loadable config

Join positions to judges on the person id to trace a judge's career across courts. Coverage is strongest for federal judges and state appellate judges; many state trial judges are not in this database, and for those the opinions themselves (see docketx/us-caselaw) name the presiding judge.

Load it

from datasets import load_dataset
judges = load_dataset("docketx/us-judges", "judges")
positions = load_dataset("docketx/us-judges", "positions")

Part of the DocketX open legal corpus, alongside docketx/us-caselaw (the national opinion corpus) and docketx/oral-arguments-us (argument transcripts).