Case Law Across Pakistan: What the Legalise Database Covers

The Legalise case law database started as an Islamabad High Court collection, and the Islamabad High Court is still its headline. What has changed is the reach. The database now spans written judgments from courts across Pakistan -- the Islamabad, Lahore, Peshawar, Sindh, and Balochistan High Courts, alongside the Federal Shariat Court and the Federal Constitutional Court -- brought together as one searchable library. In total it now holds well over thirty thousand judgments, all filterable by court, so a practitioner can stay within a single high court or search across all of them at once.

One Library, Every Court

An advocate practising in Islamabad does not only cite Islamabad judgments. A point on limitation, on the framing of a writ, on the reading of a federal statute, is just as likely to be settled by a judgment of the Lahore or Sindh High Court, or by the Federal Shariat Court on a matter within its jurisdiction. Keeping the courts in separate silos would work against how research actually happens. So the case law database is one unified collection: the court is a filter you can apply, not a wall you have to work around. The Islamabad High Court remains the default and the headline, and the other courts extend the breadth of precedent available without changing how the page works.

Why Only Written Judgments

Not every disposal by a court produces citable authority. A matter can be decided by a short order that records the outcome without reasons, or disposed of without a written judgment at all. Those outcomes bind the parties, but they are not precedent -- there is no reasoning to cite, distinguish, or rely on in another case.

The database deliberately includes only judgments that carry a full written decision. These are the judgments that state the facts, the issues, the reasoning, and the ratio -- the ones an advocate can actually put before a court as authority. It is the same reason reported judgments matter more than unreported ones in day-to-day practice: a written judgment is something you can build an argument on. Everything in the collection is drawn from decisions the courts themselves publish and that sit in the public domain, and every result links back to the original judgment on the issuing court's own portal so the source can be read in full.

Coverage Grows, and It Is Honest About Its Edges

Coverage is not uniform across every court, and it does not claim to be. Some courts publish their full written record openly; others expose a narrower set. The Balochistan High Court coverage, for example, begins from 2010 and currently reflects the judgments of the court's sitting judges. Where a court's coverage has a boundary like that, the database says so on the page rather than implying completeness it does not have. Coverage also grows over time as more written judgments are published and added.

How to Use It

Open the case law database, pick a court (or leave it on all courts), and search by legal concept, case number, party name, statute, or keyword. Each result carries a plain-language summary, the key holdings, and the ratio decidendi, with a link to the original judgment for the full text. For a step-by-step walkthrough of searching and the statute-section cross-reference, see the companion tutorial on searching the case law database.