Generally, court dockets contain all materials filed by the court or by any party in a court proceeding. The docket itself is referred to by its docket number. The chronological listing of items of the docket is called the docket sheet.
Docket Content by Court
Trial-level dockets often reference the underlying complaint, answer(s), motions, orders, final judgments, and other pleadings. Appellate-level dockets generally reference appellee and appellant briefs, amicus briefs, and other documents relating to appellate cases.
Locating Dockets
There are a few options for searching court dockets:
Bloomberg: under "Litigation," click "Dockets Search"
Westlaw: under "All Content," click "Dockets"
Lexis+: under "Content Type," click "Dockets"
Lexis+ CourtLink: Lexis+ CourtLink provides an advanced search interface on the Lexis+ platform. To get to CourtLink, login to your Lexis account, click the "product switcher" box in the top left corner of the page, and select Lexis Advance CourtLink.
CourtListener RECAP Archive (https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/): This free resource from the CourtListener project gathers crowd-sourced documents from federal dockets and makes them available through its web interface.
PACER: The Law Library does not have a PACER account to provide to students. However, any member of the public may create an account and search PACER for fees assessed per-search and per-page of download. If you incur fees less than $30 per quarter, you will not be charged. We recommend starting with other options available to you (Lexis CourtLink, RECAP Archive) first before searching in PACER.
