Caselaw vs Hudoc

Caselaw tools 7

• caselaw_searchFull-text search of Pakistani judgments (Supreme Court, High Courts, Federal Shariat Court and tribunals, 1970 onward), with optional filters by court, judge, law report and year. 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 and the public URL. For an exact report citation use caselaw_lookup_citation. To read a case, pass its id to caselaw_get_case.
• caselaw_search_questionsFind judgments by the QUESTION they settle, rather than by words they contain. 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.
• caselaw_lookup_citationFind the judgment(s) at an exact law-report citation. 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.
• caselaw_get_caseFetch one judgment by id. 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 body text (capped at ~40,000 chars; the response flags body_truncated/body_chars_total when longer).