reporters-db

What it is and what it does

reporters-db is a curated database of U.S. court reporters and legal abbreviations, compiled from CourtListener case citations, major legal publishers, and Harvard's Case.law database. It exposes reporter metadata, statutory abbreviations, journal abbreviations, state abbreviations, and case-name abbreviations as importable Python variables (REPORTERS, LAWS, JOURNALS, STATE_ABBREVIATIONS, CASE_NAME_ABBREVIATIONS) and provides lookup tables for reporter variations and editions.

The package is designed for legal software that needs to parse, normalize, or resolve citations to court opinions. It has been in production use since around 2012 in CourtListener's citation finder and is used by downstream tools like the Free Law Ferret browser extension. The data follows Bluebook standards and includes variations for local rules and historical usage patterns. Since it loads data from JSON files on import, it is most efficient when imported once and reused.

Use it for:

• Parse and normalize legal citations in court documents or case law databases by resolving reporter abbreviations to canonical forms.
• Build a legal research tool that auto-completes or suggests reporter abbreviations as users type case citations.
• Validate or standardize state and statute abbreviations in legal documents or metadata records.
• Map reporter editions to their canonical reporters for deduplication or cross-referencing in legal databases.
• Generate lookup tables for legal document processing pipelines that need to recognize and standardize reporter names and variations.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Provides a comprehensive database of U.S. court reporters and legal abbreviations (1,167 reporters and 2,102 name variations) accessible as Python variables, JSON, or CSV for citation parsing and legal document processing.

Yes. The package is actively maintained, has zero known vulnerabilities, low install friction, and provides a well-sourced, production-tested database for legal citation work. Install it if you are building legal research tools, citation parsers, or document standardization systems that need reliable reporter and abbreviation metadata. The only caveat is to import it once per process rather than repeatedly, since it loads JSON from disk.

Install

reporters-db on PyPI

pip install reporters-db

uv add reporters-db

poetry add reporters-db

Installing reporters-db

Before you install

Low install friction—pure Python wheel with no runtime dependencies. Actively maintained with a release within the last 50 days and no known vulnerabilities.

License in practice

BSD-2-Clause permissive license allows commercial and private use with minimal restrictions; attribution required.

Quickstart

pip install reporters-db

from reporters_db import REPORTERS, LAWS, STATE_ABBREVIATIONS

# Access reporter data
reporter_entry = REPORTERS.get('A.')
state_abbr = STATE_ABBREVIATIONS.get('Ala.')

Requires Python 3.9 or later; loads several JSON files from disk on import, so avoid repeated imports in performance-critical code.

Verify before relying

• Whether the package's JSON files are bundled in the wheel or fetched at runtime, and their total size impact on installation.
• Performance characteristics when querying large reporter datasets or iterating over all 1,167 reporters.
• Whether the CSV export tool (make_csv.py) is available as a CLI command or requires manual script invocation.

Package facts

Evidence: reporters_db-3.2.66-py3-none-any.whl

Keywords: legal, reporters

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