National Archives Find Case Law: Public API (0.6.0)
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 other documents held by The National Archives and published via the Find Case Law service.
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.
Documents in Find Case Law are identified in two different ways, one which is better for machines and one which is better for humans:
Every document in Find Case Law has a unique machine-readable identifier which is not designed to be human-facing. You should prefer using this identifier internally when referencing Find Case Law documents, as it is stable and globally unique. Document URIs can contain the characters a-z, 0-9, / and -.
Documents which were submitted to the National Archives prior to April 2025 will have a URI in the form court/year/sequence, for example uksc/2024/123. Although this looks like it contains many attributes from a Neutral Citation Number, you should not treat it as such and attempt to extract information from it.
Documents submitted to the National Archives from April 2025 onwards will usually have a URI which looks something like d-f11e093f-8a53-4e43-8dd8-1531b5d8f018. These will always begin with a d-.
In addition to the Document URI, all documents will also have one or more "structured identifiers" representing ways which humans can refer to a document. This currently includes Find Case Law Identifiers (for all documents) and Neutral Citation Numbers (for judgments which have them), but may be extended in future.
Each identifier will have – as a minimum – a type, a value and a slug which can be turned into a human-facing URL by appending it to https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk.
Identifiers are not guaranteed to be unique to a single document.
| Type | type | Example value | Example slug |
|---|---|---|---|
| Find Case Law Identifier | fclid | cw7s3kws | tna.cw7s3kws |
| Neutral Citation Number | ukncn | [2024] UKSC 123 | uksc/2024/123 |
Each document will have exactly one preferred identifier, determined by the Find Case Law system, which it will prefer for displaying to users and generating public-facing URLs. You must not make any assumptions about the type of this preferred identifier, as it may change.
You can make up to 1,000 requests (of any type) to Find Case Law in any rolling five minute period per IP address. If you have exceeded this, you will receive a HTTP 429 error code.
If you need to make more requests, please email caselaw@nationalarchives.gov.uk to talk about your requirements.
We are still actively developing the Find Case Law service. This includes improving how you can access our data programmatically.
If you have suggestions, comments or queries about the API or the data it provides, please email them to caselaw@nationalarchives.gov.uk.
If you'd be interested in taking part in user research to help improve the service, please sign up.