Introduction

Court Rules is a data service for legal software. The API returns the filing rules of federal and state courts and their judges, each with the court’s own wording and a link to the document it came from. For the Eastern District of New York it also checks a filing against a judge’s rules before the filing is made. A second feed covers privacy enforcement events from federal and state regulators. Both feeds are available through a REST API and an MCP server.

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Two data domains

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Court rules

Filing rules for federal district courts and state trial courts, down to the judge or courtroom where the court publishes them. The rules include local rules, general orders, standing orders, individual practices and courtroom rules. Each rule comes with the court’s own sentence, a plain-English summary, a rule type from a fixed list, and a link to the document it came from, with the page and section when the document has them. For the Eastern District of New York, the API also checks a filing against the judge’s rules. You send the document’s details and the filing context, and the API checks them against three rule layers (FRCP, Local Rules and Standing Orders) and returns pass or fail results that cite the specific rule. Try the quickstart

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Enforcement data

Privacy enforcement events from federal and state regulators, such as settlements, fines, consent decrees and investigations. Each event names the company, the violation types, the laws cited and the remedies, and it gives the fine amount when one was announced. Every event links to an official government source. Search by jurisdiction, date, industry, risk level or violation type. The data is available through MCP and the console. Browse the data model

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Start here

1. Read Coverage to see which courts and judges the API holds rules for, and how to check a court in code. The coverage page on courtrules.app lists today’s counts.
2. Get an API key at console.courtrules.app. Sign in with Google or email, copy the key, and send it as a Bearer token. Authentication shows the header.
3. Read a court’s rules with Read a court’s rules, or run a compliance check with the Quickstart.

Every key has limits on calls a minute, calls a day and rows returned a day. Rate limits gives the numbers, explains how rows are counted, and says how to ask for higher limits.

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Coverage

Every API key can query every court we cover. Counts of courts and judges change as courts are added, so they are not listed here. The coverage page on courtrules.app shows today’s counts, and Coverage shows how to read them from the API. Enforcement data is available through MCP and the console.

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Data freshness

Court rules: Courts rarely change their rules more than a few times a year, so every source is read again at least once a quarter. Court holidays are updated monthly. When a page has changed, we update its rules. Each rule links to the court’s own document, so you can confirm the wording at the source, and an Atom feed lists new versions of court documents as we find them. The coverage page lists each kind of source, and Coverage explains how to follow new documents. Enforcement: the data is updated daily, and a new event appears after the next daily check. Enforcement data shows how to poll for new events.

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What’s next

Pick a path based on what you’re building:

• Filing rules for litigation software: Start with Read a court’s rules, then explore Integration patterns
• Filing compliance checks: Start with the Quickstart
• Enforcement monitoring for in-house legal platforms: Start with MCP: enforcement data, then browse Enforcement data
• AI agent integration: See Building with AI agents
• Evaluating Court Rules: See how the same brief gets different results depending on the judge