---
license: cc0-1.0
language:
- en
task_categories:
- text-retrieval
- text-generation
size_categories:
- 10K<n<100K
configs:
- config_name: default
  data_files: data/*.jsonl.gz
tags:
- legal
- law
- caselaw
- delaware
- us-law
- state-law
- court-opinions
- public-domain
- rag
- retrieval
- legal-nlp
- legal-research
pretty_name: Delaware Case Law
---

# Delaware Case Law

> **Code & tools:** [github.com/docketx](https://github.com/docketx) — [legal-scrambler](https://github.com/docketx/legal-scrambler) pseudonymises a case file on your own hardware before a frontier model sees it; [claude-for-legal](https://github.com/docketx/claude-for-legal) is the Claude Code plugin (`docketx-open-law`) that loads these datasets and checks citations against them.

## Source & credit — Free Law Project / CourtListener

Every opinion in this dataset comes from the **Free Law Project / CourtListener bulk export of
2026-06-30** (10,798,347 opinions). CourtListener gathered, cleaned, deduplicated and published that
record; [Free Law Project](https://free.law) — the 501(c)(3) non-profit behind it, building free
public access to American law since 2010 — pays for it. We sliced and reformatted; they did the hard
part. Go to the source: <https://www.courtlistener.com>.

**Free Law Project is a non-profit, and it is worth supporting: <https://free.law/donate/>.**
If this data is useful to you, credit Free Law Project and CourtListener too, and consider going
straight to the source: CourtListener runs its own
[API and MCP server](https://wiki.free.law/c/courtlistener/help/api).

Full text of 23,480 Delaware appellate opinion documents from the public record,
sliced from the Free Law Project / CourtListener bulk export of 2026-06-30.

Court coverage (3 court ids, explicit allowlist — never prefix-matched):
`del`, `delch`, `delorphct`.

Lead opinions and separate opinions; documents under 1 characters excluded.
Slice sha256 `be7d8ca6b221c8f3143498ca139e09f4eb3d9a2107b0ff16ed12f44c745a2599` (also in `slice.manifest.json`).

## Composition

Measured on this exact slice: **17,449** documents (74.3%) carry 2,000+
characters of text, 2,309 (9.8%) carry 200-1,999, and 3,722
(15.9%) are under 200 characters. The short ones are real records, not errors: certiorari
denials, one-line orders, and judgment entries. They are kept deliberately (min_chars = 1)
so this is the complete public record rather than a filtered subset. Filter on `len(text)` if you want
only substantive opinions.

## Format

Rows follow **docketx record v1** (one opinion per line): `id`, `doc_type`, `jurisdiction`, `title`,
`text`, `source`, `license`, `retrieved_at`, plus `citation`, `court`, `date`, and `extra`
(CourtListener opinion/cluster ids, opinion type). The same format is used across every
docketx dataset.

## Provenance and license

Judicial opinions are edicts of government: uncopyrightable works of the public domain
(*Banks v. Manchester*, 128 U.S. 244 (1888); *Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org*, 590 U.S. 255 (2020)).
This packaging is released under CC0 1.0. Source: CourtListener bulk export (2026-06-30),
Free Law Project — https://free.law. This dataset redistributes public-domain court text; it adds no
annotation and asserts no rights.

## Load it

```python
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("docketx/us-caselaw-de")
```

Part of the DocketRouter legal corpora: https://huggingface.co/docketx