Court judgments, legislation and court records: official sources

Find Case Law, run by The National Archives, is the official free service for court judgments and tribunal decisions in England and Wales, and legislation.gov.uk is the official, revised text of UK law. Alongside them sit the Sentencing Council's guidelines, the UK Supreme Court's case pages, tribunal decisions on GOV.UK, Crown Prosecution Service data and the courts services of Scotland and Northern Ireland. A fact-checker uses them to quote what a court actually decided, what the law says on a given date, and how sentencing and prosecutions are measured.

Covers: UK · Release calendar

What it publishes

Find Case Law publishes judgments from the UK Supreme Court and Privy Council (from 2009), the Court of Appeal (from 2001 for civil, 2003 for criminal), the High Court, the Upper Tribunals and the Employment Appeal Tribunal, plus a selection from the Crown Court, County Court, Family Court and Court of Protection.
Each Find Case Law judgment has a neutral citation, a web page, a PDF and a structured XML version, and since 19 April 2022 judgments have been transferred to The National Archives directly by the courts.
legislation.gov.uk holds Acts of the UK Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, Senedd Cymru and the Northern Ireland Assembly, statutory instruments and legislation originating from the EU, in both 'as enacted' and revised versions with a timeline of changes.
The Sentencing Council publishes every offence-specific and general sentencing guideline for the Crown Court and magistrates' courts in England and Wales, plus statistical summaries and research on how guidelines are used.
The UK Supreme Court's website has a page for each case with a plain-English summary of the issue, hearing dates, the judgment and a press summary.
GOV.UK hosts searchable databases of employment tribunal decisions (England, Wales and Scotland) and Employment Appeal Tribunal decisions.
The Crown Prosecution Service publishes quarterly data summaries on charging, prosecutions, conviction rates and case outcomes, including separate tables for rape, domestic abuse and hate crime.
The Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service and Judiciary NI publish judgments for Scotland and Northern Ireland, whose court systems are separate from England and Wales.

Key datasets

Find Case Law
Free search of judgments and tribunal decisions for England and Wales and the UK-wide Supreme Court, by party, citation, court, judge or date. Coverage dates differ by court and are listed on the coverage page.
Updated: Continuous, as judgments are handed down
Find Case Law courts and coverage
States which courts send judgments, the years held for each, and what is not routinely received, such as most Crown Court and County Court decisions.
Updated: Updated as coverage grows
legislation.gov.uk
The official statute book for the UK, with revised text, in-force annotations, geographical extent and point-in-time versions of each provision.
Updated: Daily for new legislation; revisions within about three months of amendments taking effect
Sentencing Council guidelines (Crown Court)
Full text of every guideline used in the Crown Court in England and Wales, with harm and culpability categories, starting points and ranges.
Updated: As guidelines are issued or amended
Sentencing Council statistical summaries and data tables
Offence-level summaries of sentencing outcomes and sentence lengths in England and Wales, based on Ministry of Justice court data.
Updated: Annual and ad hoc
UK Supreme Court cases
Case pages for every appeal, filterable by status (permission, hearing listed, judgment given), area of law and dates.
Updated: Continuous
Employment tribunal decisions
Searchable written judgments from employment tribunals in England, Wales and Scotland, filterable by jurisdiction code and date.
Updated: Continuous
CPS quarterly data summaries
Crown Prosecution Service management information on referrals, charging, completed prosecutions, conviction rates and victim attrition in England and Wales, with quarterly and rolling-year figures.
Updated: Quarterly
Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service judgments
Opinions and judgments from the Court of Session, High Court of Justiciary, sheriff courts and Scottish tribunals.
Updated: Continuous
Judiciary NI judicial decisions
Published judgments from the Court of Appeal, High Court and other courts in Northern Ireland.
Updated: Continuous

APIs and downloads

Find Case Law public API
Atom feed of new and updated judgments plus each judgment as XML (LegalDocML) or PDF by adding /data.xml or /data.pdf to its address. No key needed; the limit is 1,000 requests in any rolling five minutes per IP address, with HTTP 429 beyond that.
Find Case Law Atom feed
Machine-readable list of recently published or updated judgments, which can be filtered and ordered by transfer date to detect changes.
Open Justice Licence and computational analysis licence
Judgments may be copied, published and used commercially under the Open Justice Licence. Bulk programmatic analysis, text and data mining and building vector databases count as computational analysis and need a separate licence, with no application charge.
legislation.gov.uk API
Every page has machine-readable versions: XML (data.xml), Akoma Ntoso (data.akn), RDF and Atom feeds. No key is needed, and content is under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The fair use policy asks automated users to send an identifying User-Agent.
legislation.gov.uk URI scheme
Explains how to build stable addresses for an Act, a section, a version on a date (for example adding /2015-01-01) and a geographical extent.
legislation.gov.uk new legislation feed
Atom feed of newly published and updated legislation.

When it publishes

Find Case Law and the Supreme Court publish judgments as they are handed down, on dates the courts announce in advance. legislation.gov.uk adds new Acts and statutory instruments shortly after they are made and aims to apply amendments to revised text within three months of them taking effect. CPS quarterly data summaries follow a published timetable on the CPS site, and Ministry of Justice court, tribunal and legal aid statistics appear at 9:30am on dates pre-announced on the GOV.UK statistics calendar.

How to use it to check a claim

Quote a judgment by its neutral citation (for example [2022] UKSC 27) and link to the Find Case Law or court page, not to a summary of it.
Read the operative part of a judgment, usually the final paragraphs, for what the court ordered; the press summary is useful but is not part of the reasons.
When a claim says a law 'is in force', open the revised version on legislation.gov.uk, look for in-force annotations and check the 'Changes to legislation' banner for amendments not yet applied.
For what the law said on an earlier date, use the point-in-time view or add the date to the address, rather than relying on the current text.
For sentencing claims, separate the statutory maximum (in the Act), the guideline range (Sentencing Council) and the sentences actually given (MoJ statistics).
For conviction rates, check whether the figure is the CPS rate (convictions out of completed prosecutions) or the MoJ conviction ratio (convictions over prosecutions in a year).
Check the jurisdiction: a judgment or law for England and Wales may not apply in Scotland or Northern Ireland.

Common mistakes

Find Case Law is not a complete record of all cases: most criminal cases in the magistrates' courts and Crown Court end without a published judgment.
The 'as enacted' version of an Act shows the law as passed and carries no in-force information, so it can differ from the law as it now stands.
A sentencing guideline range is not the sentence served; most determinate prison sentences are served partly on licence in the community.
CPS data summaries are management information, provisional and open to revision, rather than accredited official statistics.
Employment tribunal judgments are first-instance decisions that do not bind other tribunals, unlike Employment Appeal Tribunal rulings.
Re-using Find Case Law judgments in bulk for text and data mining needs a computational analysis licence, even though reading and quoting them is free.

Is Find Case Law free, and can I use judgments commercially?

Yes. Reading, downloading, quoting and sharing judgments is free, and the Open Justice Licence allows commercial use, including putting judgments into your own product. The exception is computational analysis: programmatic bulk searching, text and data mining across the collection needs a licence from The National Archives, for which there is no application charge.

How do I see what a law said on a particular date?

On legislation.gov.uk, open the revised version of the Act or section and use the timeline of changes or the 'What version' options to pick a point in time. You can also add the date to the address, such as /2015-01-01 after the section number. Point-in-time versions are only available for revised legislation, and recent amendments may not yet have been applied.

Where are Scottish and Northern Ireland judgments published?

Scottish judgments are on the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service website, covering the Court of Session, High Court of Justiciary, sheriff courts and tribunals. Northern Ireland judgments are on the Judiciary NI website. Find Case Law covers England and Wales and the UK Supreme Court, which hears some appeals from Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Does the Supreme Court publish every case?

The UK Supreme Court has a page for each appeal it handles, including permission decisions, hearing dates, judgments and press summaries, and its judgments since 2009 are also on Find Case Law. Hearings are open to the public, and the Court's website lists upcoming hearings and judgment dates.

Questions answered using this source

Links checked 2026-10-13. This page describes what the source publishes and gives no verdict on any claim.