SCOTUS Oyez Oral Arguments Scraper

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Scrape Supreme Court oral argument transcripts, case metadata, and speaker-attributed speech from Oyez (the IIT Chicago-Kent canonical SCOTUS index). Covers 5,000+ cases dating back to 1955 with full transcripts showing justice and advocate turns, audio links, decisions, votes, and advocate details.

What You Get

Each output record contains:

• Case metadata: docket number, case name, parties, term year, lower court, manner of jurisdiction, citation
• Dates: date argued and date decided (ISO 8601)
• People: which justices heard the case, which decided it, and all advocates with their roles
• Decisions: majority/dissenting vote counts, winning party, decision type
• Oral argument sessions: title, audio MP3 URL, duration (when fetchTranscripts is enabled)
• Full transcripts: speaker-attributed segments with justice/advocate name, role, spoken text, and start/end timestamps in seconds
• Opinion announcements: post-decision audio and transcripts
• Written opinions: author, type (majority, concurring, dissenting), Justia link
• Case summaries: facts of the case, conclusion (HTML-stripped)
• Cross-references: Justia URL, Oyez canonical URL, Oyez API URL

Input Options

Example: Single Case with Transcript

{
"termStart":2021,
"docketNumber":"19-1392",
"fetchTranscripts":true,
"maxItems":1
}

Returns Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization with the full Oyez-normalized transcript, audio link, advocate list, and decision metadata.

Example: Full Recent Term (No Transcripts)

{
"termStart":2022,
"termEnd":2022,
"fetchTranscripts":false,
"maxItems":0
}

Returns all ~62 October 2022 Term cases with metadata, advocate lists, and decision records — no transcript audio fetches.

Example: Dobbs + Bruen (Named Case Search)

{
"termStart":2021,
"termEnd":2021,
"caseName":"New York",
"fetchTranscripts":true,
"maxItems":5
}

Transcript Format

When fetchTranscripts is enabled, oral_argument_transcript contains a JSON-serialized array:

[
{
"speaker":"John G. Roberts, Jr.",
"role":"Chief Justice of the United States",
"text":"We will hear argument this morning in Case 19-1392...",
"start_sec":0.08,
"end_sec":9.2,
"section":0
},
{
"speaker":"Scott Stewart",
"role":"Counsel for Petitioner",
"text":"Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court...",
"start_sec":9.2,
"end_sec":45.1,
"section":0
}
]

Audio MP3 links are in oral_argument_sessions[].media_url.

Data Source & Attribution

Data is sourced from the Oyez Project, operated by IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. Oyez's normalized case metadata and annotation work (justice attribution, summaries) is licensed CC BY-NC 4.0 — commercial redistribution of Oyez's annotated content requires attribution. The underlying oral argument audio and verbatim transcripts are US federal government works and are public domain.

Performance

• Rate-limited to 2 requests/second out of respect for Oyez's non-profit infrastructure
• Memory: 256 MB (no browser)
• Typical run: ~1-2 seconds per case without transcripts; ~3-5 seconds per case with transcripts (one additional API call per oral argument session)

Why Oyez?

Oyez is the only public source with speaker-attributed SCOTUS oral argument transcripts. supremecourt.gov publishes raw transcript PDFs but without justice attribution or audio alignment. Oyez normalizes these into a structured JSON API with justice/advocate identification, making it the canonical source for constitutional law research, legal-tech RAG pipelines, and AI training datasets.