Pakistan Case Law

section='summary' (default) returns metadata + the headnote (plain-language summary, the
laws/provisions referred, and keyword tags) — read this first to judge relevance cheaply.
section='full' additionally returns the judgment text; a long judgment arrives in its first part and says so.
Long judgment: section='outline' gives a map (the judge's paragraph numbers, each separate opinion, the order),
then paras='41-55' reads exactly those paragraphs (paras='2:3-5' = opinion 2, paragraphs 3-5, where separate
opinions each restart their numbers), find='words' returns the paragraphs of this judgment that
match, and start=N continues from a character position. These return the court's own words, never a summary.

Most useful on RECENT judgments: a 2024-25 case usually has nobody citing it yet, but its
own citation list is a curated map of the established authority on the point.

Most useful on OLDER or landmark judgments: it shows whether the case is still followed and
where the principle has been applied since. A leading case can have hundreds of citing cases.

Example: journal='PLD', year=1995, page=34  → PLD 1995 Supreme Court 34.
Omit page to list everything reported in that journal+year. Returns the same case shape
as caselaw_search.

Ranking follows how lawyers research: nearness to the legal point decides which cases are
returned; among comparably-near cases, more senior court > larger bench > more recent >
more cited. For the current state of the law, add year_from (e.g. 2025); use sort='court'
for the most authoritative first.

With no query, the filters list judgments newest first - e.g. court='Supreme Court' gives the
latest Supreme Court judgments, journal='PLD' with year_from=year_to=2024 gives that volume,
and sort='recently_added' alone shows what was added to the site most recently.

Returns cases with id, title, citation, court, year, outcome, author (the judge who wrote it, when
known) and the public URL; a keyword search also gives the number of judges on the bench and the
words of the judgment that matched. For an exact
report citation use caselaw_lookup_citation. To read a case, pass its id to caselaw_get_case.

Every judgment summary on this corpus records the questions that judgment actually decides — e.g.
"Does delay in lodging the FIR by itself entitle the accused to bail?" This searches those
questions, so it matches the shape a legal problem arrives in rather than the vocabulary a
1987 bench happened to use.

COVERAGE IS PARTIAL: only some judgments have a summary with questions yet (the response's
`coverage_note` gives the current live ratio, which keeps growing). An empty result means no
*summarised* judgment matched — it does NOT mean no such judgment exists. Fall back to
caselaw_search, which covers the whole corpus.

The questions are prepared from the judgment text. They are a finding aid, not a
holding: cite the judgment, never the question. Pass an id to caselaw_get_case to read it.