gb_search_case_law
Read-onlyIdempotent
Search UK case law on the National Archives' Find Case Law service, using filters for court, date range, and full-text to retrieve relevant judgments.
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 |