A 9th Circuit court case lookup can be done two ways: the court’s own website at ca9.uscourts.gov gives you every published opinion and memorandum disposition for free, and the federal PACER system gives you the full docket and every filed document for a small per-page fee. If you only want the ruling, the free site is usually enough. If you want the briefs, motions, or procedural history, you’ll need PACER or one of its free mirrors.
What You Need Before Searching
The fastest lookup uses the appellate case number. Ninth Circuit numbers follow a standard format: a two-digit year, a hyphen, and a sequential number assigned when the appeal opens, like 24-2776 or 24-6007.1United States Courts for the Ninth Circuit. Opinions The sequential portion varies in length, so don’t assume a fixed number of digits.
Without a case number, you can search by party name. Those searches return more results than you want, so pair the name with at least one other detail: the year the appeal was filed, the case type (civil, criminal, immigration), or the district court where the case started. The lower court’s case number works as a cross-reference in both search systems.
The Ninth Circuit hears appeals from federal district and bankruptcy courts in Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands, plus petitions for review of certain federal agency decisions.2United States Courts for the Ninth Circuit. What is the Ninth Circuit? Cases from state courts in those states don’t appear here.
Free Opinions on the Ninth Circuit Website
If you only need the ruling, start at the court’s opinions page. The search tool filters by case title, case number, authoring judge, case origin, case type, and date filed.1United States Courts for the Ninth Circuit. Opinions Both published opinions, which set binding precedent across the circuit, and unpublished memorandum dispositions, which resolve a case without creating new precedent, appear here. The court uploads decisions as they are filed, so there’s no lag between the ruling and its posting. Everything on this site is free to view and download.
Full Case Records Through PACER
For anything beyond the final opinion, use Public Access to Court Electronic Records. PACER is the federal judiciary’s central database for case filings across every federal court, and it holds the complete docket sheet for each case along with most underlying documents: opening and response briefs, motions, orders, and appendices.3Public Access to Court Electronic Records. PACER Federal Court Records
Setting Up an Account
Register at pacer.uscourts.gov/register-account. Most people looking up records should pick the “Case Search Only” option, which gives access to dockets and documents without the filing capabilities attorneys use.4Public Access to Court Electronic Records. Register for an Account The form asks for a tax identification number, which PACER uses only for debt collection if fees go unpaid. One login works across every federal court.
Running the Search
Two paths. You can go directly into the Ninth Circuit’s CM/ECF system and enter a case number or party name, or you can use the PACER Case Locator at pcl.uscourts.gov to search across all federal courts at once. The Case Locator helps when you’re not sure which court has the case or when you want to follow a case from the district court up through the appeal.5United States Courts. Find a Case (PACER)
Add filters to any party-name search. Narrow by date range, case type, or originating court. A common surname with no filters can return hundreds of results, and you pay for every page of those results.
What PACER Costs
PACER charges $0.10 per page for documents and search results, with a $3.00 cap per document regardless of length. If your total charges stay at $30.00 or less in a calendar quarter, all fees for that quarter are waived.6United States Courts. Electronic Public Access Program – FY2026 That quarterly waiver is why most casual users never actually pay. Court opinions viewed through PACER are free even for users who have exceeded the threshold.5United States Courts. Find a Case (PACER)
One quirk catches people out: PACER charges for search results even when the search returns nothing. A zero-match search still costs $0.10 for the one-page result screen.
If you cannot afford the fees, you can request an exemption directly from the court. Each court decides these requests individually, so contact the clerk’s office for its procedure.7Public Access to Court Electronic Records. Options to Access Records if You Cannot Afford PACER Fees
A Free Alternative: CourtListener and RECAP
Before paying on PACER, check CourtListener. Run by the nonprofit Free Law Project, it maintains an archive of millions of PACER documents that anyone can search and download for free. The archive is built through the RECAP browser extension, used by roughly 30,000 people; when a RECAP user buys a document on PACER, the extension automatically uploads a copy to the public archive.8CourtListener.com. RECAP Archive Coverage
The search page at courtlistener.com/recap lets you filter for Ninth Circuit cases by selecting the court under “Federal Appellate.” You can search by docket number, case name, party name, judge, or date range.9CourtListener.com. Advanced RECAP Archive Search Coverage depends on whether someone else has already pulled the document you want through PACER while running the extension, so it isn’t comprehensive. High-profile cases tend to be well covered.
Oral Argument Audio and Video
The Ninth Circuit records most oral arguments and posts them to a searchable archive on its website. You can search by case name, case number, panel members, hearing location, or date range, with direct links to audio and video.10Ninth Circuit Appeals Court. Audio and Video Not every case gets oral argument (many are decided on the briefs), but when there is one, the recording is free.
The court also live-streams arguments and posts recordings to its YouTube channel at youtube.com/@9thCircuit.11United States Courts for the Ninth Circuit. Live Video Streaming of Oral Arguments and Events For a case you’re following in real time, the live stream is the fastest way to see what happened before the written decision comes out weeks or months later.
Reading What You Find
The docket sheet is the chronological log of everything filed in the case. Each entry has a date and a short description, and the most recent entry usually tells you where things stand. A few entries come up over and over:
- Opinion Filed: the court has issued its ruling. Published opinions bind the whole circuit; unpublished memorandum dispositions do not.
- Disposition: the general term for the court’s final decision, whether it affirms, reverses, or remands.
- Submitted or Argued: the case has been handed to the panel for decision, either after oral argument or on the briefs. No ruling yet.
- Mandate Issued: the formal order returning the case to the lower court. Under the federal appellate rules, parties have 14 days to seek rehearing (45 days when a federal government party is involved), and the mandate issues 7 days after that window closes. Once the mandate issues, the Ninth Circuit’s role in the case is over.12Legal Information Institute. Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure Rule 41 – Mandate Contents, Issuance and Effective Date, Stay13Legal Information Institute. Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure Rule 40 – Panel Rehearing, En Banc Determination
When You Can’t Find the Case
If your search comes up empty for a case you know exists, one likely explanation is sealing. The Ninth Circuit starts from a strong presumption of public access and will not seal a case just because the parties agree to it. A party seeking to seal must file a motion showing a specific risk of harm and explaining why a less restrictive alternative like redaction wouldn’t work.14Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Interim Circuit Rule 27-13 – Sealed Documents A sealed docket may be invisible entirely, or may appear with individual entries marked restricted.
Even in unsealed filings, some personal details are missing by design. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 5.2 and Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 49.1 require parties to trim Social Security numbers to the last four digits, reduce dates of birth to just the year, identify minor children by initials only, and shorten financial account numbers to the last four digits. If you’re looking for someone’s personal information in a court filing, you won’t find it.
Older Ninth Circuit cases predate PACER’s electronic coverage. Physical records for those files are held at two National Archives locations: the National Archives at San Francisco (in San Bruno, California) and the National Archives at Kansas City, Missouri.15Federal Judicial Center. U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit – Records and Bibliography Contact the relevant facility by email to locate and request copies. Archival retrieval takes longer than any online search.