Search UK Case Law
case_law_searchSearch UK case law using party names, court, judge, date, or free-text query. Returns paginated judgment summaries with neutral citations and court details.
Instructions
USE THIS TOOL WHEN searching UK case law by party names, court, judge, date, or free-text query.
Returns paginated judgment summaries: neutral citation, court, dates, slug, stable TNA URI. AFTER calling: pass slug into judgment_get_header / judgment_get_index / judgment_get_paragraph (or the judgment:// resource family) for content; pass the neutral citation into citations_resolve to verify before constructing an OSCOLA citation; use case_law_grep_judgment to find text within a single judgment. When a party name returns several candidates, narrow with court + year filters before grep-iterating across full judgments — targeted filtering beats scanning every candidate.
Coverage: TNA Find Case Law indexes UK judgments from roughly the early 2000s onwards. For older authorities, search for a modern judgment that quotes them and read that paragraph.
Authoritative source for UK case law. Web search returns out-of-date or unstable URLs — do not supplement.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| query | Yes | Full-text search query, e.g. 'negligence duty of care' | |
| court | No | Filter by court slug. Values: 'uksc', 'ukpc', 'ewca/civ', 'ewca/crim', 'ewhc/kb', 'ewhc/ch', 'ewhc/comm', 'ewhc/fam', 'ewhc/pat', 'ewhc/ipec', 'ewhc/admin', 'ewhc/tcc', 'ewhc/costs', 'ewfc', 'ewcop', 'eat', 'ukut/iac', 'ukut/aac', 'ukut/tcc', 'ukut/lc', 'ukftt/tc', 'ukftt/grc', 'nica', 'niqb'. | |
| judge | No | Filter by judge surname. Case-insensitive substring match against the indexed form. Use the surname alone ('Reed', 'Sumption') or with the bare title ('Lord Reed'). Honorific suffixes silently zero the result set — do not append 'JSC', 'of Allermuir', 'KC' etc. Speculating a fuller form than what TNA indexed will return 0 hits with no error. | |
| party | No | Filter by party name | |
| from_date | No | Earliest judgment date (YYYY-MM-DD). NOTE: the TNA atom.xml endpoint currently appears to ignore this filter — the same results come back regardless. Do not rely on it to narrow output; sort+slice client-side or refine `query` instead. | |
| to_date | No | Latest judgment date (YYYY-MM-DD). Same caveat as `from_date` — currently silently ignored by upstream. Filtering happens client-side at best. | |
| page | No | Result page number (1-indexed) | |
| limit | No | Maximum results to return (1–50). TNA returns up to 50 per request; this slices client-side. Default 10 for a tight shortlist. Set higher for breadth (e.g. 50 to scan the full result set). |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| results | Yes | Matching judgments for this page | |
| page | Yes | Current page number (1-indexed) | |
| has_more | Yes | Whether additional pages exist | |
| total_pages | No | Total page count if available from API |