Terms of use

What is in these terms

These terms tell you the rules for using the Find Case Law service at https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk.

Who we are and how to contact us

The Find Case Law service is provided by The National Archives.

You can contact us by email at caselaw@nationalarchives.gov.uk.

If your online access is limited and you need to speak to someone you can call us during office hours on 020 8876 3444. Please leave your number and message and we will call you back.

By using the Find Case Law service you accept these terms

By using the Find Case Law service, you confirm that you accept these terms of use and that you agree to comply with them.

Fair and reasonable use

You must use the service responsibly by not making too many requests. In order to maintain the integrity of the service for everyone, we may block or disable use of the service from certain IP addresses, for making too many requests.

Crawling and indexing

You may access the Find Case Law service through the website, or access the data through the API.

We do not permit external indexing of documents by search engine robots or spiders. You must adhere to both, the instructions in the robots.txt file at: https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/robots.txt and the 'noindex' directive in the 'X- Robots-Tag' meta tag HTTP header response for the URLs of all documents and their related assets.

We may block or disable use of the service from certain IP addresses, if they appear to be compiling a search engine index.

Coverage

You should be aware that the Find Case Law service is incomplete. It is not a complete record of Court Judgments and Tribunal Decisions for the courts or tribunals.

You should be aware that some judgments may subsequently have been appealed and the judgments on appeal may not be included in the Find Case Law service. You should satisfy yourself that a judgment has not been the subject of an appeal before relying on it as an authority.

You should be aware that judgments given from 19 April 2022 onwards have been transferred to The National Archives directly by the courts and tribunals. We have a complete chain of custody for these records through the transfer process.

You should be aware that judgments given prior to 19 April 2022 have been sourced by The National Archives from a variety of different sources, including BAILII (www.bailii.org).

Formats

The Find Case Law service has been designed to provide users with access to Court Judgments and Tribunal Decisions in a variety of different formats. The available formats include web pages (HTML) with hyperlinks, PDFs to download, and XML data for re-use by third parties. There is an API which provides access to the data, including details of newly published judgments and decisions.

You should be aware that, as part of our publishing process, we have transformed the original version of the judgment from (typically) Word into XML (the Legal Document Mark-up language) and PDF. We have used the XML to create the HTML versions of the judgments. We have also added hyperlinks. There may be minor formatting issues with the published version of the judgments as a result of the conversion and enrichment process.

Licensing

You may use and re-use the contents of the Find Case Law service under the terms of the Open Justice Licence.

You must read the licence and understand its terms if you are re-using the information from the Find Case Law service, as there are important conditions and exclusions that apply.

You must apply for a licence to do computational analysis if you wish to conduct computational analysis of the information provided by the Find Case Law service. The application process is free of charge.

You should contact us if you require bulk access to the data provided by the Find Case Law service, rather than attempt to crawl or scrape the website.