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The Find Case Law API allows you to access court judgments and tribunal decisions held in the Find Case Law service, operated by the National Archives.
Our API provides access to judgments and decisions held by Find Case Law that have been converted from Microsoft Word documents into XML. These have been automatically marked up according to the international data standard, LegalDocML, and validated by our legal editorial team. This data includes:
The National Archives has worked in collaboration with The Ministry of Justice and the Judicial Executive Board to design a new licensing framework for the reuse of case law as data. The Open Justice licence is designed to protect the personal data within the records while supporting the principles of Open Justice.
The Open Justice licence allows you to copy, publish, distribute and transmit case law data. It permits you to use the data commercially, for example, by combining it with other information, or by including it in your own product or application. There are certain conditions that apply under this licence.
You do not need to apply to re-use Find Case Law records if your re-use complies with the terms and conditions of the Open Justice Licence.
The Open Justice licence does not permit computational analysis. If you intend to do any programmatic searching in bulk across the Find Case Law records to identify, extract or enrich contents within the records you will need to apply to perform computational analysis. There are no application charges.
We are still actively developing Find Case Law based on user feedback. This includes improving the experience of how data re-users can access the data.
You can provide feedback by using our feedback form.
Whenever a judgment gets changed it appears in the recently published list. This includes minor updates such as when we enrich the document with hyperlinks to other legal citations, as well as more significant changes such as revisions we have received from the courts.
Both the Atom feed and the judgment XML include a content hash so that you can check if the text of the document has changed.
Without any parameters, this will give the most recently handed down judgments and decisions. The parameters used are identical to those used for the advanced search at https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/judgments/search: a link to the feed mirroring those search results is available on each search result.
Each differently named parameter filters out documents that do not match it.
The feed has multiple pages (see the link tag with a rel attribute of next for the next page).
Each entry tag contains a different document's metadata. Notable tags include:
<tna:contenthash>: A hash of the text in the judgment, with whitespace removed. Can be used to determine if the underlying judgment text has changed.<link type="application/akn+xml">: A link to the XML of the judgment<link type="application/pdf">: A link to the PDF of the judgment| query | string Full text search of a judgment. |
| court | string A court code. Currently there are two forms of court code, one used in the URL structure ( |
| tribunal | string A tribunal. Identical to the court codes above. |
| party | string A full-match for a word in the name of a party to the judgment. |
| judge | string A full-match for a word in the name of a judge or similar involved in the judgment |
| order | string Default: "-date" Enum: "date" "-date" "updated" "-updated" "transformation" "-transformation" Which of the dates within the document to use for ordering. Prepend a
|
| page | integer >= 1 Default: 1 Where results are across multiple pages, the page of results to return. |
| per_page | integer Default: 50 How many results to list per page. |
Deprecated -- will now redirect to /atom.xml with relevant parameters
Less specific feeds can be gained by omitting the components e.g. /, /2022/, /ewhc/ and /ewhc/ch/ are all valid prefixes to atom.xml.
Note that a {court} is required if there is a {subdivision}.
| court required | string Example: ewca The court code to return results for. |
| subdivision required | string Example: pat The court subdivision code to return results for. |
| year required | integer Example: 2022 The year to return results for. |
| order | string Default: "-date" Enum: "date" "-date" "updated" "-updated" "transformation" "-transformation" Which of the dates within the document to use for ordering. Prepend a
|
| page | integer >= 1 Default: 1 Where results are across multiple pages, the page of results to return. |