Courts

The Courts page defines the courts your cases are heard in. A case can be associated with one or more courts, and that association is what makes automatic deadline calculation work: each court carries its assigned deadline rules, and the Rules column here shows how many each court has.

What a Court Records

• Name and Short Name: the full name and the working abbreviation (e.g. “S.D. Tex.”).
• Jurisdiction: the court’s classification, whether federal (Appellate, District, Bankruptcy, Special), state (Supreme, Appellate, Trial, Special, Attorney General), tribal, territory, military, committee, or international. The jurisdiction categorizes the court so the right deadline rules can be applied, and the list groups by it.
• Location: state and county; federal courts also take the District within the state (Southern, Northern) or, for appellate courts, the Circuit (5th, 9th).
• Court Code: the short CourtListener identifier (e.g. “txsd” for the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas), used to match court data on import.
• Citation: the Bluebook abbreviation used when citing the court in documents.
• Website: the court’s URL.

A court that’s referenced by cases or deadline rules can’t be deleted. The list can be exported with all its detail columns.