Dockets, filings, and court records
RECAP Archive
RECAP is a free public archive of federal court filings, built from documents that PACER users bought and donated through the RECAP browser extension.
It is run by the Free Law Project, a nonprofit, and hosted on CourtListener. Tens of millions of federal filings are already in it, and reading them costs nothing. Any tool that checks RECAP before buying from PACER is saving you money on documents the public already paid for.
The archive's coverage is uneven by design. A document is in RECAP only because somebody already purchased it, so heavily watched cases are close to complete while quiet dockets and filings from the last few days are often missing.
The archive grows every time someone with the extension pays for a document, which makes it a public good funded by private research. Checking RECAP first is both cheaper and the polite thing to do, because buying a document that is already free wastes money for no benefit to anyone.
How it appears on a docket
A RECAP-sourced docket entry looks identical to the court's, with an extra note that the document is available free from the archive rather than from PACER.
Related terms
More on dockets, filings, and court records
See this term in a real case
Search federal court records and read the filings where recap archive actually shows up. New to federal dockets? Start with how to find a federal case.