The Open Bankruptcy Project today released a national, district-level index of federal bankruptcy cases covering all 94 U.S. bankruptcy court districts. The index is available at openbankruptcyproject.org/cases/ and is intended to support empirical research, public-records access, and educational use by debtors, attorneys, researchers, journalists, and the general public.
The index is built from the RECAP Archive, maintained by the Free Law Project, and every case record links to CourtListener as the primary source. Users who want to view a docket, pull a filing, or verify a case detail are routed to CourtListener, where the underlying records live.
Scope: Metadata Only
The index contains metadata only -- case number, case caption, chapter, and date filed -- organized by federal bankruptcy district. The Open Bankruptcy Project does not reproduce docket PDFs, filing text, or document content of any kind. All primary-source access, including full dockets and individual filings, is handled through CourtListener. This design keeps the index lightweight, keeps attribution clean, and keeps traffic flowing to the canonical primary-source host.
What the index is: a navigation and research layer on top of the RECAP Archive. Browse by district, see case-level metadata, click through to CourtListener for anything deeper.
What the index is not: a mirror of docket PDFs, an e-filing system, or a replacement for PACER or CourtListener.
Purpose and Use
Federal bankruptcy data is public, but it is not always easy to navigate at the district level or across districts. The national case index is designed to lower the cost of three specific activities: empirical research on filing patterns across districts, public-records access for non-specialist users who do not want to create a PACER account for a single lookup, and educational use in law-school clinics and civics classrooms.
The dataset is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license and is marked up with schema.org/Dataset structured data so that search engines, academic aggregators, and research tools can discover and cite it.
How to Browse
The hub page at openbankruptcyproject.org/cases/ lets users enter by district. From the district view, each case links out to its CourtListener docket page for primary-source access. The scope is uniform across all 94 districts; the index does not favor, highlight, or single out any district as a focus of investigation.
Data Sources and Attribution
The national case index is built from, and depends entirely on, the following upstream infrastructure, which is credited here in accordance with the CC BY-SA 4.0 license:
- Free Law Project -- https://free.law/. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit that builds and maintains open legal infrastructure, including CourtListener and the RECAP Archive.
- RECAP Archive -- https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/. A public archive of federal court filings contributed by PACER users through the RECAP browser extension. The archive is the upstream source of the case records indexed here.
- CourtListener -- https://www.courtlistener.com/. The primary-source host for every case record in the index. Each case link in the index resolves to its CourtListener docket page.
The Open Bankruptcy Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and is independent of the Free Law Project. We are grateful to the Free Law Project and its contributors for the open infrastructure that makes this kind of research possible.
Related Resources
- National Federal Bankruptcy Case Index -- browse by district
- Open Bankruptcy Project Research
- All OBP News & Analysis
Methodology: The index is derived from case-level metadata in the RECAP Archive, maintained by the Free Law Project. Fields indexed are case number, case caption, chapter, and date filed, organized by federal bankruptcy district across all 94 U.S. bankruptcy court districts. The Open Bankruptcy Project does not reproduce docket PDFs or filing text; every case record links to CourtListener as the primary source. The dataset is marked up with schema.org/Dataset structured data and released under CC BY-SA 4.0. This work was prepared by the Open Bankruptcy Project Research Team.