About & Sources

What this is

This is an independent, non-commercial research tool indexing opinions and case dispositions of the Illinois Court of Claims — the state tribunal that hears money claims against the State of Illinois, including tort claims, contract claims, claims under the Crime Victims Compensation Act (740 ILCS 45), the Line of Duty Compensation Act, and claims on lapsed appropriations. It offers full-text search, a page per opinion, and links back to authoritative sources.

How this compares with CourtListener

CourtListener is a free, nonprofit legal database, and it already carries Court of Claims opinions for volumes 1–53 (1889–2001) from Harvard's Caselaw Access Project. Those years are searchable there at no cost, and each opinion on this site from those volumes links to its CourtListener page. What this site adds:

Volumes 54–77 (2001–2025). CourtListener's collection stops at volume 53. These are the recent opinions people most often cite.
About 165,000 case dispositions without a published opinion (awards, denials, dismissals, lapsed-appropriation lists), searchable by claimant name and case number. I know of no other online source for these.
Corrected text and the printed page. Every opinion has its own PDF cut from the official volume, with OCR corrections and bracketed page markers for pin cites. CourtListener's text for older volumes is uncorrected OCR.
Court of Claims-specific browsing: topic pages (crime victims, wrongful imprisonment, lapsed appropriations, line of duty), and lists by respondent agency, outcome and decade.
Statutes and caselaw in one place: the Court of Claims Act and Crime Victims Compensation Act text, including amendments not yet in effect, and Illinois court opinions about the Court.

For volumes 1–53, CourtListener is a good alternative source with alerts and cross-court search. Comparison current as of October 2026.

Data provenance

The underlying text comes from the official Court of Claims volumes published by (and linked from) the Illinois Secretary of State / Court of Claims, currently volumes 1 through 77. Each volume is a scanned PDF of the printed reports. This site's data pipeline:

Downloads/verifies the official volume PDFs (hashes tracked per volume).
OCRs and parses each volume into individual opinions and case dispositions.
Extracts structured fields (case number, caption, date filed, award amount, disposition) from the OCR'd text using pattern-based parsing.
Publishes the result here as full-text-searchable pages, with a link to the exact PDF page of the official volume for every opinion.

The PDF is authoritative. All opinion text, captions, case numbers, dates, and dollar amounts on this site are OCR- and pattern-derived and can contain errors — misread digits, garbled OCR on damaged pages, mis-split opinions, etc. Always verify against the linked official PDF before relying on any detail here for a filing, citation, or other consequential use. This site is not legal advice and is not affiliated with the Illinois Court of Claims, the Secretary of State, or the Attorney General.

Coverage

9,201 opinions with OCR-derived full text across the available official volumes, including volumes 1–10.
165,954 additional case dispositions without a published opinion (award/denial/dismissal lines and lapsed-appropriation lists).
Volumes 1–10 (1880–1943) are OCR-derived and searchable; their scans remain especially important for verification.
Volumes 24 and 32 are incomplete, pending re-scanning by the Clerk's office.

None of the above means a volume's cases don't exist — only that this site doesn't yet have searchable text for them. The official PDF is always linked regardless.

Why a SQLite-over-range-requests dispositions table?

The dispositions dataset (about 165,000 rows) is too large to ship as one JSON file — or as one whole SQLite file — to every visitor, and this site has no server-side database (it's fully static, for cheap/simple hosting). Instead, /dispositions/ queries a compact, page-aligned SQLite file in place using sql.js-httpvfs (SQLite compiled to WebAssembly, fetching only the ~4 KB pages a query touches via HTTP range requests). A typical claimant-name or case-number search transfers tens to a few hundred KB — not the 60 MB file. See README_SITE.md for the measured numbers, the indexing approach (prefix search on indexed columns rather than FTS5), and the fallback for hosts that don't support range requests.

Corrections

Found an OCR error, a mis-parsed field, or a bug? Always include the opinion citation or stable opinion key and the official PDF page. Submit a correction or issue report.