@pipeworx/uk-caselaw

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Tools: 3

Judgments and tribunal decisions of the UK courts, from The National Archives’ Find Case Law service: the Supreme Court, Privy Council, Court of Appeal, High Court, Court of Protection, Family Court, the Upper and First-tier Tribunals and the Employment Appeal Tribunal.

Search by subject, party or judge, then read the full text of any judgment from its neutral citation — so a quoted passage or a cited authority can be checked against what the court actually wrote.

This is UK law only. US case law is a separate corpus served by court-listener (search_case_law, find_case, get_opinion); an American authority returned for a UK question is a wrong answer, not a near miss.

This is not all UK law

Find Case Law is a real but partial corpus. A 0-row result means not found here, never no such case:

• No Crown Court, County Court or Magistrates’ Court judgments. Most of what those courts decide is given orally and never transcribed, so Find Case Law structurally cannot hold it.
• No dockets, pleadings or filings. This is judgments only — there is no UK equivalent of PACER here.
• Scotland and Northern Ireland’s own court systems are not covered. Only England & Wales courts and the UK-wide apex courts/tribunals (Supreme Court, Privy Council, Employment Appeal Tribunal, Upper Tribunal) are indexed. A case that also went through the Court of Session or a Scottish/NI appeal may still appear here only for its UK-level leg.
• The Employment Appeal Tribunal only — not the first-tier Employment Tribunal. eat covers appeals; ET claims before they reach appeal are a different, uncovered corpus (see the uk-tribunals pack/task).
• No citator/treatment data. A judgment comes back as published, with no signal on whether it was later overturned, doubted or followed.
• Coverage is mostly 2001 onward, comprehensively from 2003 for some courts and much later for others (see Caveats below).

Auth

None. No key, no signup. Requests carry a browser User-Agent because the service rejects a bare fetch signature.

Tools

The usual path is search_uk_caselaw → take the neutral_citation or identifier → get_uk_judgment.

Neutral citations

A neutral citation maps onto a Find Case Law path by rule — [2026] EWHC 1996 (Comm) is ewhc/comm/2026/1996, [2023] UKSC 42 is uksc/2023/42. The rule is a good first guess, so get_uk_judgment tries it and falls back to searching the citation text when the derived path 404s, reporting which route resolved it in resolved_by. Either form is accepted as input.

Data sources

• Search: https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/atom.xml (Atom feed)
• Judgment text: https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/<identifier>/data.xml (Akoma Ntoso XML)
• Service: https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

Judgments are Crown copyright, published under the Open Justice Licence.

Licence note. The Open Justice Licence covers per-query pass-through — a caller searches, we relay the matching judgments back — but it explicitly excludes “computational analysis”: bulk programmatic extraction or mirroring/indexing the corpus requires a separate licence Pipeworx does not hold. This pack is not, and must not become, a mirror of Find Case Law.

Caveats worth passing to a user

• Coverage starts recently. Find Case Law holds judgments the courts published to it — comprehensively from 2003 for some courts and much later for others. A missing older authority means not held here, not no such case. For historic authority a law-report subscription is still the answer.
• An unrecognised court code is rejected before any request goes upstream, as an invalid_arguments error naming the bad code and the full valid list (call list_uk_courts to get it fresh). Codes look like uksc, ewca/civ, ewhc/comm and cannot be guessed from a court’s name — and the Employment Appeal Tribunal’s code is eat, not the “ukeat” its name would suggest (fixed 2026-09-18; every code in list_uk_courts is now one that has been probed live against the atom feed and confirmed to return entries).
• Search is over the judgment text, so a phrase the court would actually write finds more than a legal concept it never names.
• Judgments are long — 140k–450k characters is ordinary. get_uk_judgment bounds the response with max_chars and sets truncated so a cut-off text is never mistaken for the whole judgment.
• Only newest, oldest and relevance sort. Upstream answers an unrecognised sort with an empty feed, which would read as “no such cases”, so the pack rejects one instead of passing it through.

Tools

• search_uk_caselaw — Search UK court judgments and tribunal decisions by subject, party name or judge — the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, High Court, Court of Protection, Family Court, Employment Appeal Tribunal and the
• get_uk_judgment — Fetch the FULL TEXT of a UK judgment from its neutral citation (“[2023] UKSC 42”, “[2026] EWHC 1996 (Comm)”) or its Find Case Law identifier. Returns the judgment text along with the case name, court,
• list_uk_courts — List the UK courts and tribunals covered by Find Case Law with the court code each one uses. Call this before narrowing search_uk_caselaw by court — a code like “ewhc/comm” cannot be guessed from “Com