gb_search_case_law
Read-onlyIdempotent
Search UK case law from The National Archives' Find Case Law service. Filter by court, text, or date range to retrieve judgments with metadata.
Instructions
Search UK case law on The National Archives' Find Case Law service.
Maps to the public Atom feed at caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/atom.xml
(confirmed live 2026-07-06 - keyless, Open Justice Licence). A separate service from
legislation.gov.uk: different host, different Atom dialect (tna: namespace).
Input Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| court | No | court/tribunal code, e.g. ``"ewhc/admin"``, ``"ewca/civ"``, ``"uksc"``. Passed through to Find Case Law's own ``court`` query param. | |
| limit | No | max items to return (1..100). | |
| query | No | full-text search (matches judgment text in order, per upstream docs). | |
| to_date | No | ISO 8601 date (YYYY-MM-DD), inclusive. Same client-side caveat. | |
| from_date | No | ISO 8601 date (YYYY-MM-DD), inclusive. Find Case Law's public API has no documented server-side date-range filter, so this is applied client-side against each result's ``date`` field after fetching. |
Output Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| items | No | ||
| query_echo | No | ||
| dataset_note | No | caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk (Find Case Law, The National Archives) publishes judgments under the Open Justice Licence - a separate service from legislation.gov.uk (different host, no shared identifier scheme). Pre-April-2025 documents have a derivable URI ('/{court}/{year}/{number}'); documents from April 2025 onward use an opaque 'd-{uuid}' URI (fclid) that cannot be derived from the neutral citation alone. human_readable_citation is the neutral citation, e.g. '[2026] EWHC 1698 (Admin)'. | |
| total_estimate | Yes |