Find Case Law (UK National Archives)

Find Case Law is the National Archives' official outlet for judgments and tribunal decisions from the senior courts of England and Wales, and the collection keeps growing as fresh decisions are handed down and older ones are digitised and added. The detail that sets it apart is the format: judgments are published as structured XML in the Akoma Ntoso standard (a shared markup language for legal documents), so numbered paragraphs, headings, party names, and neutral citations are explicitly tagged rather than lost inside free-flowing HTML.

For retrieval that structure is a genuine gift. Because the document is already marked up, you can split a judgment at natural, meaningful boundaries (by numbered paragraph, say) instead of guessing where one passage ends and the next begins in scraped text. There is a documented API for programmatic access and an Atom feed for tracking new decisions, and you can pull individual judgments on demand. Carry the neutral citation on every chunk and your system can cite a precise, checkable reference back in its answers.

This is the cleanest authoritative feed of modern UK case law, which makes it a strong backbone for legal research assistants, litigation support, and question answering over English and Welsh judgments. If you want judgments you can trust and quote, this is the place to begin.

The licence is where you must take real care. The content sits under the Open Justice Licence, which allows many uses but sets specific conditions on computational analysis, and in particular using the records to train machine learning or AI models needs separate permission from the National Archives. Retrieving and displaying a judgment to a user is not the same act as training an embedding model or fine-tuning on the text, so read the terms closely and ask first if you are unsure. Attribution is required and commercial use is restricted.

For broader historical coverage add BAILII, and for the statutes the judgments interpret, Legislation.gov.uk.