Using DAWSON to Access Federal Tax Court Records
October 3, 2025
You may be familiar with PACER, which provides public access to electronic federal court records. But did you know that the Federal Tax Court has its own case management system? It’s called DAWSON (Docket Access Within a Secure Online Network), and unlike PACER, it’s completely free to use!
DAWSON, which launched in 2020, is the U.S. Tax Courts case management system. The U.S. Tax Court is a federal trial court for taxpayers disputing certain IRS determinations. DAWSON allows parties to electronically file and access dockets for their cases, and contains a public search function of interest to anyone researching activity at the Tax Court.
Public access to DAWSON is completely free. The documents available for public view are as follows:
• Opinions and orders issued by the Court on or after May 1, 1986.
• Post-trial briefs e-Filed by practitioners on or after August 1, 2023.
• Amicus briefs filed on or after August 1, 2023.
• Stipulated Decisions filed on or after August 1, 2023.
Any sealed dockets or individual documents, of which there are quite a few in Tax Court proceedings, are not available to the public.
Searching DAWSON is quick and easy starting at the homepage:
The simplest way to find a specific case is with the docket number (format “123-19”), but you can also search by petitioner name or case type. For orders and opinions you can also search by judge name.
Once you have a case pulled up, any accessible documents will be hyperlinked and immediately available to view:
While PACER is the better known of the two, DAWSON has an impressive user interface and is completely free to use. Keep it in mind as a helpful resource for U.S. Tax Court research!