Please note: Generally, federal court records less than 15 years old are still in the possession of individual courts and are not held by the National Archives.
To obtain access to those records, researchers must contact the appropriate federal court.
Online access to case and docket information is provided for a fee by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts through PACER. The court may refer you to a Federal Records Center to obtain copies.
Court Records at the National Archives cover more than 200 years of court proceedings at the federal level. The earliest court records in our holdings date to approximately 1790. It is estimated that there are more than 2.2 billion textual pages of court materials in the National Archives. As the court retires materials annually, this number continues to grow.
Court materials are created by:
The types of records are primarily case files. Categories of case files include: