The Case Law Database: 39,000+ Written Judgments Across Eight Courts

The case law database holds more than thirty nine thousand written judgments drawn from eight Pakistani courts, and the Supreme Court of Pakistan sits at the top of it. That is a change from where the collection started, and it is worth being precise about, because the earlier description of this library was an Islamabad High Court collection with other courts attached to the side. It is not that any more. It is one national corpus in which the apex court is the apex court and every other court is filterable beside it.

The eight are the Supreme Court of Pakistan, the Islamabad, Lahore, Peshawar, Sindh and Balochistan High Courts, and the Federal Shariat and Federal Constitutional Courts.

One library, with the court as a filter

An advocate researching a point does not restrict themselves to one court, and the database is built on that assumption. A question on limitation, on the framing of a writ, on the construction of a federal statute, may well be settled by the Supreme Court, and if it is not then a considered judgment of the Lahore or Sindh High Court is worth reading even where it binds nobody in Islamabad.

So the collection is unified and the court is a facet. Leave it on all courts and you search everything at once. Pick one and you stay inside it. Every result card names its own court, so a persuasive authority never quietly presents itself as a binding one, and every result links back to the judgment on the issuing court's own portal so the text can be read at source rather than taken from a summary.

Written judgments only, and why that is a feature

Not every disposal produces authority. A matter can be decided by a short order recording the outcome without reasons, or disposed of with no written judgment at all. Those outcomes bind the parties in front of the court, but there is nothing in them to cite, distinguish or rely on anywhere else.

The database therefore takes only judgments that carry a full written decision: the ones stating facts, issues, reasoning and ratio, which are the ones an advocate can actually put before a court. This is the same instinct that makes a reported judgment more useful in practice than an unreported one. Everything in the collection is drawn from what the courts themselves publish and what already sits in the public domain.

Searching it

Search runs across the full text of the collection and ranks by relevance rather than by date, returning an extract around your terms so you can judge a result before opening it. You can search by legal concept, by party name, by case or citation number, by statute, or by any phrase you expect to appear in the reasoning.

There is a second route that is easy to miss and often faster. The statute cross reference lets you start from a provision rather than from a phrase, so you can ask which judgments have construed a given section and work outward from there. When you are trying to establish how a section has actually been read, that is usually a better opening move than guessing at the words a judge might have used.

Each result carries a plain language summary, the key holdings and the ratio, with the link to the original judgment for the full text.

Coverage, and its edges

Coverage is not uniform across the eight courts, and the pages say so rather than implying a completeness the collection does not have. Some courts publish their entire written record openly and others expose a narrower set. Where a court's coverage has a boundary, the note under the court filter states it: the Balochistan High Court collection begins from 2010 and reflects the judgments of the court's sitting judges, and the Supreme Court coverage states the span of years it actually holds. Coverage grows as more written judgments are published.

What it costs

A visitor without an account gets a preview of two hundred records, the hundred most recent Supreme Court judgments and the hundred most recent Islamabad High Court ones, which is enough to see what a record looks like and how the search behaves. Every other court is available once you sign in.

The full database, all eight courts and all thirty nine thousand judgments, is available to anyone with an account, and making an account requires no payment. It is not held behind the membership. The membership pays for drafting, review and compilation; the research layer is open to any signed in advocate, and the introductory access terms for the wider reference tools are set out on the pricing page.

A note on how to read the filter

One habit worth forming. When you find an authority through the all courts view, look at the court on the card before you rely on it, and ask the question you would ask in court: is this binding here, or is it persuasive. The database will happily show you a Peshawar High Court judgment on a point pending in Islamabad, because that judgment may be the best reasoning available on the question. What it will not do is tell you it binds the court you are appearing before, and neither should anything else.

This post replaces three earlier ones written before the Supreme Court was added and before the collection was reframed as a national corpus: Case Law Across Pakistan: What the Legalise Database Covers, How to Search the IHC Case Law Database on Legalise: Full Tutorial and Searching Islamabad High Court Judgments on Legalise. All three remain available and are marked as archive.