Indian Kanoon Case Law Scraper

Search Indian Kanoon, India's largest free case-law and legislation index, by keyword and get back structured judgment data — court, citation, decision date, bench, full text, and citation counts — instead of a page of search results you'd have to open one by one.

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Indian Kanoon Scraper Features

• Runs your search phrase against Indian Kanoon's own full-text index, spanning the Supreme Court, every High Court, tribunals, and central and state legislation
• Returns the complete judgment or order text for every matching document, not just the search snippet
• Captures court, citation, decision date, and bench (judge names) when the document discloses them
• Reports how many other documents cite each result, plus the case citations and Act/Code references the judgment itself draws on
• Paginates through the result set automatically up to your maxItems target

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Who Uses Indian Kanoon Case Law Data?

• Legal researchers and litigators — pull every judgment on a legal issue or statute into one structured dataset instead of reading search results page by page
• Legaltech and case-management tools — feed full-text judgments and citation signals into search, summarization, or precedent-ranking products
• Compliance and policy teams — track how courts are interpreting a specific Act, section, or regulation over time
• Academic and market researchers — analyze case law trends across courts, time periods, or subject areas at scale

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How Indian Kanoon Scraper Works

1. Give it a query — the search phrase you'd type into Indian Kanoon's own search box (a legal issue, party name, or statute).
2. It works through the matching results, opening each document to pull the full text and metadata.
3. Records land in your dataset as they're collected, so you can start using them before the run finishes.

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Input

{
  "query": "right to privacy article 21",
  "maxItems": 10
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
query	string	—	Search phrase to run against Indian Kanoon (required)
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum number of documents to scrape (required)
resumeCursor	string	—	Cursor from a previous run's Output, used to continue a stopped crawl

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Indian Kanoon Scraper Output Fields

{
  "title": "Vinit Kumar vs Central Bureau Of Investigation And Ors on 22 October, 2019",
  "doc_type": "judgment",
  "court": "Bombay High Court",
  "citation": "AIRONLINE 2019 BOM 1117, 2020 (1) ABR(CRI) 1",
  "decision_date": "22 October, 2019",
  "judges": "Ranjit More, N. J. Jamadar",
  "doc_url": "https://indiankanoon.org/doc/107953018/",
  "full_text": "...",
  "cited_by_count": 1,
  "cites": ["Some Earlier Case vs State"],
  "acts_referenced": ["The Indian Telegraph Act, 1885"]
}

Field	Type	Description
title	string	Case or document title, as published on Indian Kanoon
doc_type	string	judgment, act, or section, inferred from the document title
court	string	Court, tribunal, or source database the document was filed under
citation	string	Published equivalent citation(s), when Indian Kanoon lists one (sparse)
decision_date	string	Decision or order date, as it appears in the title
judges	string	Bench (judge names) or authoring judge, when disclosed (sparse — tribunal orders frequently omit this)
doc_url	string	Canonical Indian Kanoon document URL
full_text	string	Full judgment or document text
cited_by_count	integer	Number of other Indian Kanoon documents that cite this one
cites	array	Case citations the judgment text itself links to inline (sparse — not every document hyperlinks its citations)
acts_referenced	array	Acts, Codes, Rules, or constitutional provisions the judgment text references inline (sparse)

cited_by_count is Indian Kanoon's own authoritative citation count for the document. cites and acts_referenced reflect the citations and statute references the judgment's own text hyperlinks — real links drawn from the document, not every citation Indian Kanoon's broader index associates with it, so an empty array means the text carried no inline links rather than that the document has no citation history.

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Resuming a large crawl

Every run emits a resumeCursor in its Output. If a large crawl stops before it finishes — because it hit maxItems, your spend cap (maxTotalChargeUsd), or was aborted — start a new run with the same input plus that resumeCursor to continue from where it left off. The crawl resumes from the queued work the previous run didn't reach.

• You are not re-charged for records the earlier run already delivered.
• Resume within your account's run-retention window — on the free tier, roughly your 10 most recent runs. Once the source run is pruned, its resumeCursor is no longer valid.
• resumeCursor is opaque — supply it unmodified.

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FAQ

How do I search Indian Kanoon case law?

Set query to the search phrase you want to run — a legal issue, party name, or statute — and maxItems to how many documents you want back. No account or Indian Kanoon login is required.

What data can I get from Indian Kanoon?

Full judgment and order text, court, citation, decision date, bench, and citation signals (how many documents cite each result, plus the case and statute references the judgment itself draws on) for Supreme Court, High Court, tribunal, and legislative documents.

Does this cover every Indian court?

Indian Kanoon's own index spans the Supreme Court, every High Court, numerous tribunals, and central and state legislation — this scraper searches that same index, so coverage matches whatever Indian Kanoon itself has indexed for your query.

Why are cites and acts_referenced sometimes empty?

Those fields capture citations and statute references the judgment's own text hyperlinks. Not every document — especially shorter orders — links its citations inline, so an empty array there means no inline links were present, not that the document has no citation history. cited_by_count is unaffected and always reflects Indian Kanoon's own count.

How much does Indian Kanoon Case Law Scraper cost to run?

It runs on a pay-per-result model, so you pay for the documents you actually get back — not a flat rate per run regardless of output.

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Need More Features?

Have a request or found a bug? Open an issue and we'll take a look.

Why Use Indian Kanoon Case Law Scraper?

• The only full-text search + citation layer for Indian case law on the store — distinct from per-court case-status lookup tools, this searches Indian Kanoon's cross-court judgment and legislation index by keyword
• Full text, not just a snippet — every result includes the complete judgment or order text, ready for downstream search or analysis
• Structured citation signals — citation counts and in-text references come back as clean fields instead of buried in prose