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Research · Lahore High Court

Lahore High Court Statistics

Aggregate patterns across the published, reasoned judgments of the Lahore High Court: caseload composition, the statutes cited most often, who is most often named as respondent, and how judgment volume and bench composition have moved over time.

Every figure below is an aggregate computed across the whole set. No individual judgment, litigant, or case specific detail is reported here, and no judgment is quoted or summarised. To read case specific summaries and holdings, use the Case Law Database. To see who is currently sitting on this court, use Court Benches and Statistics.

Data scope: these figures are computed from the reasoned written judgments the Lahore High Court has published on its public portal at sys.lhc.gov.pk . The set covers 2010 to 2026 and holds 4,600+ reported judgments.

These are not all the matters the Lahore High Court handles. Courts dispose of a large volume of cases through procedural orders, adjournments, dismissals for non prosecution, withdrawals and short orders that are never authored as detailed written judgments. Only the reasoned judgments approved for publication are counted here.

What you are reading is the published precedent surface, not the total caseload. It is the same body of material an advocate would consult by hand when researching a matter, aggregated.

Constitutional Practice
Article 199
Article 199 is the most frequently cited Article of the Constitution, appearing in 641 judgments , ahead of Article 10 at 218.
Primary Citations
37.1% / 27.4%
37.1% of these judgments cite the Constitution of Pakistan, 1973. 27.4% cite the Pakistan Penal Code, 1860.
Length and Duration
9 pages, 1 yr
The median judgment runs 9 pages and about 2,500 words. The median gap between the year a matter was filed and the year judgment issued is about 1 years.
Bench Composition
70.8%
Of the judgments whose bench could be identified, 70.8% were authored by a single judge, 27.9% by a division bench and 1.3% by a full or larger bench.

Caseload composition by legal division

Constitutional (52.64%) Criminal (24.25%) Civil (23.11%)
Caseload composition by legal division across 4,600+ reported judgments of the Lahore High Court.

Most cited statutes

Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898 3907 Constitution of Pakistan, 1973 3445 Pakistan Penal Code, 1860 2753 Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 2382 Qanun-e-Shahadat Order, 1984 983 Income Tax Ordinance, 2001 925 Sales Tax Act, 1990 659 Family Courts Act, 1964 412 Limitation Act, 1908 400 Control of Narcotic Substances Act, 1997 400
The statutes cited most often across these judgments.

Most frequent writ petition respondents

Federation of Pakistan 182 Government of Punjab 81 Additional District Judge 58 Police 51 Addl. District Judge, 42 Province of Punjab 38 Government of the Punjab 30 Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) 23 Additional District Judge, 22 The State 21
The entities most often named as respondent in a writ petition. Useful as a prior when settling the array of respondents in a fresh petition.

Judgment volume by year

0 200 400 600 800 2010 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 * 2025 * 2026
* The most recent years reflect ongoing publishing lag and must not be read as a fall in case volume. A judgment is published months after it is delivered.

Methodology. Judgments are captured from each court's own public portal. Statute names are canonicalised across stylistic variants before counting, so one Act cited six different ways counts as one Act. Constitutional article and Penal Code section frequencies are read from the cited statutes recorded against each judgment. Time from filing to judgment is the judgment year minus the filing year taken from the case number, a proxy that does not reflect docket level dates. Bench size is read from the bench recorded on each judgment, and judgments whose bench could not be identified are excluded from that percentage rather than counted as single judge. Recent years reflect publishing lag and are excluded from any trend statement. Figures last computed 2026-09-08.