status
selects which bench to return: active (the default) only the courts CourtListener still scrapes, inactive only the historical and defunct ones, any both. Upstream filters these as disjoint sets, so any is the only value that reaches the whole list
How to use it
status is exposed by the Courtlistener MCP Server MCP server. Add the server to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf and others), and the status tool becomes available to the model automatically. See the full listing for setup details and every tool this server provides.
Install Courtlistener MCP Server
docker run --rm -e COURTLISTENER_API_TOKEN=your-token -p 3010:3010 courtlistener-mcp-serverOther tools in Courtlistener MCP Server (23)
returns the complete filtered id set from a bundled snapshot of every CourtListener court, at no request cost — covers the default bench and every jurisdiction filter. Empty (not a truncated prefix) when more than 1,000 courts match; check allmatchingcourtidscomplete before reading emptiness as "no
(default): opinions that cite this one — measures precedential influence and downstream adoption
opinions this one cites — reveals the authority chain the court relied on
is absent from the citation-lookup payload (the court lives on the linked docket), so it is resolved from docketid — one extra request per distinct docket, bounded by maxcourtlookups (default 4, up to 20; 0 skips court resolution). courtresolution (resolved / nodocket / lookupfailed / overbudget) sa
Retrieve the citation network for an opinion: opinions cited by it (citing) or that cite it (citedby)
Fetch docket metadata and entry list for a single federal case
Fetch one disclosure's parsed line items — investments, debts, positions, income, gifts — with coded values decoded to dollar ranges; selectable by category
Fetch full biographical profile, appointment history, and education for a single judge
Fetch full text and metadata for an opinion cluster — returns all opinion variants (majority, concurrence, dissent)
Fetch full detail for a single oral argument — panel, duration, MP3 link, and speech-to-text transcript
Fetch all parties and attorneys of record for a RECAP federal docket by docket ID
Resolve legal citations (e.g., "410 U.S. 113") to cluster IDs and case metadata — one entry per citation found in the input
List courts filtered by jurisdiction type, active/inactive status, and scraper coverage
Search RECAP federal court dockets by party name, attorney, court, and date
Search federal judicial financial disclosure filings by judge and year — category counts, itemized gifts, and source PDF
Search judge records by name, appointing president, court, and political affiliation
Full-text search across 9M+ written court opinions with field-level filtering, date ranges, status, and sort
Search appellate oral argument audio recordings by case name, court, and date argued
in every response — RECAP is crowd-sourced from PACER; completeness varies by court
controls how many entries are returned (1–50); large cases have hundreds
filter useful for planning opinion searches — courts without scrapers have sparse coverage
filter applies in addition to (AND with) the q query — more precise than embedding party names in the query
is the matched excerpt from the first variant that carries one; CourtListener does not mark which variant the search matched