Search court practice
search_practiceSign-in required: call connect(email) and connect_verify first (free, one email) unless this connection is already signed in. Find court practice (teismų praktika) on a legal question or a provision - rulings and judgments (nutartys ir sprendimai) as the courts published them. PASS THE QUERY IN THE LANGUAGE THE COURT WRITES IN, for the same measured reason as search_law: Lithuanian courts in Lithuanian (an English query returns unrelated results rather than none); a European court's judgments in Lithuanian where held, else the source language; every result says its lang. Use the terms the courts use - kasacinis skundas, apeliacinis skundas, ieškinys, nutartis. Filter by court or court_level (the top court for the question's case type leads: LAT for civil, labour and criminal, LVAT for administrative and tax), by the provision the rulings cite (cites, cites_none), by whose words (voice='court'), by decision date, by case type (civil, criminal, administrative, administrative_offence) or by the court's own category code, where 43.5 narrows to that branch of the taxonomy. No parameter filters by party: rulings are served as the courts published them, with people anonymised; a company's or an institution's name kept in the text matches as words of the query (UAB <name>), and a name not found is not proof of no case. Each result names its ruling under document (case_no, court, decided_at, url; cite_as says how to cite one without a case number); a compact answer keeps document.id and document.case_no on the row and the rest under documents[<document.id>]. At tight caps, secondary identifiers, links or explanations may be explicitly deferred; follow response_budget.recover. A question about the European Human Rights Court (EŽTT/ECHR) also gets echr_catalogue: the Court's case cards (metadata and the HUDOC link), never a judgment's text.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| also | No | Other phrasings of the SAME question, each fused as its own ranking (up to 4): the term the courts use where the question uses an everyday word ('suėmimas' for 'suimtas'), or the holding's own words. Skip a mere rewording. | |
| cites | No | Keep only rulings that cite this provision (all of them, when a list), through the citation graph: `DK 58`, `DK 58 str. 2 d.`, `CK 3.192¹`. Anchors practice on a provision - `dėl darbuotojo kaltės` with cites=`DK 58` is dismissal for fault, not DK 57's without fault. | |
| limit | No | How many passages to return, default 10. Passages, not judgments: one ruling can supply several, each with its own pinpoint. | |
| query | Yes | The legal question or the provision, in the language the courts write in: IN LITHUANIAN for Lithuanian courts, in the words they use - `kasacinis skundas`, `esminis pažeidimas`; for a European court's judgments, Lithuanian where a Lithuanian text exists, else the source language. No parameter filters by party: published rulings anonymise people, but a company's or an institution's name the court kept in the text matches as words of the query (`UAB <name>`); a name not found is not proof of no case. | |
| topic | No | Narrow to a branch of the courts' own case classifier: `labour` (disputes arising from employment relations). The accepted values come from the jurisdiction's configuration. | |
| voice | No | Whose words to return. `court`: passages in which the court alone speaks (its interpretation, the facts it established, a statute or an earlier ruling it restates - each restatement names the ruling and its paragraph); a mixed paragraph with a party's words in it is left out. Ranked with the court's interpretation before a restated statute. `court_own` also leaves out restatements of earlier rulings, `court_interpretation` keeps only the court's interpretation. `voice_filter` says how many passages the filter removed, per voice. `party` the parties' arguments and the questions their appeals raise, `lower_court` a lower court's reasoning, `institution` the challenged decision of an authority, `opinion` a prosecutor's or Advocate General's opinion, or one voice name (`pretrial_body`, `mixed`, ...). Every passage carries `voice` either way, with how it was decided (`provenance`). | |
| courts | No | Filter to named courts, written as the court names itself: `Lietuvos Aukščiausiasis Teismas`, `Lietuvos apeliacinis teismas`, `Lietuvos vyriausiasis administracinis teismas`. | |
| detail | No | `compact` (the default) returns each passage with its pinpoint and an excerpt of up to ~250 characters around your terms (narrower, never below a sentence piece of ~130, when many rows share max_chars), plus `text_chars`; read the whole text with read_paragraphs(document_id=<row id>). `full` returns the whole text of every row. | compact |
| include | No | Bring back what is left out by default: `cassation_admission` returns the Supreme Court's rulings on whether to accept a cassation appeal (eCIK, CIK, BIK, ATIK numbers), which answer an admission question rather than the legal one. The answer's `filters_applied` says what was left out. | |
| outcome | No | Keep rulings whose operative part (nutaria / nusprendžia) decides this way: `granted`, `partly`, `dismissed`, `remanded`, `not_admitted`, `terminated`; for constitutional review `unconstitutional`, `partly_unconstitutional`, `constitutional` (one or several). Read from the ruling's own words, never a court-published field; on appeal and cassation it is the appeal's fate (`dismissed` = the decision under appeal left unchanged). With `cites` every cited ruling is judged before ranking; otherwise only the ranked passages' rulings, and `outcome_filter` says so. Each kept passage carries `outcome`. | |
| session | No | The `session` value the sign-in returned. Pass it on every call in this conversation, so the sign-in survives however this client handles connections; omit it when the user connected with Sign in (OAuth) or a key. | |
| category | No | The court's own category code, where a prefix narrows to a branch of its taxonomy - `43.5` is everything under 43.5. | |
| cites_any | No | Keep rulings that cite at least one of these provisions: [`DK 58`, `DK 57`]. | |
| max_chars | No | A hard cap on the answer's size in characters, default 15000. Every row is first narrowed (a ~150-character excerpt), then rows are dropped from the end (the lowest-ranked) to fit, and `truncated` says how many and how to get them; data_as_of, notes and caveats are never cut. | |
| case_types | No | Filter by kind of case: `civil`, `criminal`, `administrative`, `administrative_offence`. | |
| cites_none | No | Leave out rulings that cite any of these provisions: cites_none=`DK 57` drops dismissal-without-fault practice. | |
| court_level | No | Narrow to a level of the court hierarchy, which depends on the case type: civil (incl. labour, family) and criminal - `supreme` (LAT) > `appeal` (LApT) > `regional` > `district`; administrative (incl. tax) - `supreme_administrative` (LVAT) > `regional_administrative`; `constitutional` above both. Without it, a question whose words name the branch ranks that branch's top court first; a question that names neither ranks both top courts first. | |
| decided_after | No | Only rulings decided on or after this date, `YYYY-MM-DD`. The usual reason to pass it is 'what has been said recently', not 'what governed then'. | |
| jurisdictions | No | Which jurisdictions to search, as codes (`LT`). Omit for the account's own. |