Philippine Supreme Court Decisions Scraper

Search and export Philippine Supreme Court decisions from the Judiciary's own free archive — the Supreme Court E-Library. No account, no API key, no login.

You get the case number, the parties, the deciding division, the ponente, the promulgation date, the Philippine Reports citation and the complete opinion text — as the Court itself prints them.

What you can do

Mode	Use it for
Full-text search	Every decision mentioning a doctrine, statute, party or phrase — malversation, probable cause, syndicated estafa. Powered by the E-Library's own dtSearch engine, with keyword-in-context snippets and per-document hit counts.
Browse by year	Bulk-harvest the archive month by month for a year range (monthly listings run 1996 to present).
Full decision (by ID)	Pull the complete text of specific decisions you already have IDs for.

Search reaches further back than browse — a 1991 decision was returned from the decisions index during testing.

Example input

Find recent decisions on a doctrine, with full opinions:

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchPhrase": "probable cause",
  "searchCorpus": "sc_decision",
  "searchType": "phrase",
  "maxResults": 50,
  "fetchFullText": true
}

Bulk-harvest a year:

{ "mode": "browse", "fromYear": 2025, "toYear": 2026, "maxResults": 500 }

Fetch specific decisions:

{ "mode": "decision", "docIds": ["70008", "69244", "70515"] }

Example output

{
  "_source": "S1-decision",
  "docId": "69244",
  "caseNumber": "G.R. No. 235790",
  "caseTitle": "PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINES, PLAINTIFF-APPELLEE, VS. MONICO D. SANTOS AND FRANCIS H. CANOZA, ACCUSED, MONICO D. SANTOS, ACCUSED-APPELLANT.",
  "documentType": "DECISION",
  "division": "SECOND DIVISION",
  "ponente": "LEONEN, SAJ.",
  "reporterCitation": "930 Phil. 215",
  "decisionDate": "2022-09-21",
  "decisionDateText": "September 21, 2022",
  "fullTextLength": 41129,
  "fullText": "930 Phil. 215 SECOND DIVISION [ G.R. No. 235790, September 21, 2022 ] …",
  "documentUrl": "https://elibrary.judiciary.gov.ph/thebookshelf/showdocs/1/69244"
}

Set fetchFullText: false (the default) in search/browse mode for fast, cheap summary rows without the opinion text.

Good to know

• Three of the portal's eight search corpora are broken on the judiciary's own servers — sc_resolution, administrative_matter and bar_matter answer with dtSearch's Unable to access index error. The actor reports that as an explicit search_index_unavailable record instead of pretending there were no matches. sc_decision (the default) and sc_all work fine.
• dtSearch stops counting at 5,000 matches per query, so very broad searches report 5,000 as the total. Narrow the phrase or use browse for exhaustive coverage.
• Search results and portal pages use different document IDs. A search row carries dtSearchDocId (the engine's numbering) and links to the engine's document view; docId (the portal's numbering, usable with mode: "decision") appears on browse and decision records. They are not interchangeable.
• Decisions not yet published in Philippine Reports have no reporterCitation / reporterPdfUrl — that is expected, not an error.
• Full opinions are long: 20,000–40,000 characters is typical, but en banc and consolidated cases run far bigger — one was measured at 2,379,838 characters (2.4 MB) in a single record. Budget accordingly when fetchFullText is on.

Reliability

• HTTP-only. No browser, no login, no credentials. The site runs no WAF and imposes no rate limit; maxConcurrency still defaults to a polite 4.
• Never fails silently. Unknown document IDs soft-404 with HTTP 200 on this portal; the actor detects that and returns _error: "decision_not_found" rather than an empty-looking record. Every failure mode emits a row.
• Raw passthrough. Values are the portal's own — nothing renamed into a different taxonomy, nothing re-derived.

Data source & limits

Data comes from the Supreme Court E-Library, the Philippine Judiciary's official public archive of its decisions. The site publishes no robots.txt policy (it 404s) and requires no authentication. Court decisions are public records. You are responsible for how you use the output.