UK Court Judgments Scraper — The National Archives Find Case Law

Scrapes court judgments from The National Archives Find Case Law. Returns structured metadata and full text for judgments published by UK courts — Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, High Court, and Tribunals — covering ~370,000 decisions dating back to 2003.

No proxies. No browser. The National Archives runs an official public API that answers XML requests without complaint.

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UK Court Judgments Scraper Features

• Extracts 14 structured fields per judgment including neutral citation, court code, judge names, parties, and full judgment text
• Collects legislation and case references cited in each judgment, automatically extracted from enriched AkomaNtoso XML
• Covers all major English and Welsh courts: UKSC, UKHL, EWCA, EWHC, and First-tier and Upper Tribunals
• Paginate any segment of the feed — start from page 1 for the newest judgments, or target older date ranges by setting a start page
• Caps results precisely via maxItems — fetch 10 for a test run or leave it open for a full crawl
• Returns ISO-format dates, consistent court codes, and whitespace-normalised judgment text ready for downstream processing
• Pure API scraping — no browser or proxy needed. Runs fast at low cost.

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Who Uses UK Court Judgment Data?

• Legal tech platforms — build AI-powered case law research tools on top of structured UK judgment data
• Law firms — track precedent across EWCA and EWHC decisions, monitor litigation in a specific practice area
• Legal researchers and academics — corpus analysis, citation networks, NLP training datasets
• Litigation analytics companies — build judge-level analytics, outcome prediction models, and counsel effectiveness metrics
• Compliance and regulatory teams — monitor tribunal decisions in tax, employment, and regulatory enforcement
• Alternative legal data vendors — fill the gap in UK coverage alongside US CourtListener or PACER data

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How UK Court Judgments Scraper Works

1. The scraper paginates The National Archives Atom feed (/atom.xml?page=N), which lists 50 judgments per page in reverse chronological order. Feed pages 1 through 5 cover the most recent 250 judgments.
2. From each feed entry it extracts the case name, date, court, and neutral citation, then queues the corresponding structured XML file (/data.xml).
3. Each data.xml is an AkomaNtoso-format document. The scraper parses it to extract judge names, party names, legislation references, and the full judgment body text.
4. Results land in your Apify dataset as flat JSON records, one per judgment.

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UK Court Judgments Scraper Input Fields

{
  "maxItems": 10,
  "startPage": 1,
  "endPage": 5
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum number of judgments to return. Set 0 for no cap.
startPage	integer	1	Atom feed page to start from. Page 1 = most recent judgments.
endPage	integer	5	Atom feed page to stop at (inclusive). Each page has 50 entries.

To scrape judgments from a specific time period, set startPage and endPage to bracket the relevant portion of the feed. The feed has ~7,375 pages total as of 2026 — older judgments are at higher page numbers.

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UK Court Judgments Scraper Output Fields

{
  "tna_url": "https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/comm/2026/1015",
  "neutral_citation": "[2026] EWHC 1015 (Comm)",
  "case_name": "OWH SE iL v RTI Ltd & Anor",
  "court": "EWHC-KBD",
  "court_name": "The King's Bench Division of the High Court",
  "year": 2026,
  "case_number": "CL-2025-000313",
  "date": "2026-05-01",
  "judges": "THE HONOURABLE MRS JUSTICE DIAS",
  "parties": "OWH SE i.L., RTI LIMITED, UNITED COMPANY RUSAL, IPJSC",
  "judgment_text": "Mrs Justice Dias: INTRODUCTION 1. I have before me three applications...",
  "legislation_refs": "1996 c. 23 s. 66; 1996 c. 23; 2018 c. 13; [2026] UKSC 10",
  "data_xml_url": "https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/comm/2026/1015/data.xml",
  "scraped_at": "2026-05-05T08:31:52.880Z"
}

Field	Type	Description
tna_url	string	URL of the judgment on The National Archives Find Case Law
neutral_citation	string	Neutral citation number, e.g. [2026] EWHC 1015 (Comm)
case_name	string	Case name / title, e.g. Smith v Jones
court	string	Court code, e.g. EWHC-KBD, UKSC, EWCA-Civ, UKFTT-TC
court_name	string	Full court name
year	integer	Year of judgment
case_number	string	Internal court case number (available for High Court; absent for most Tribunals)
date	string	Date of judgment in ISO 8601 format
judges	string	Judges who heard the case, comma-separated
parties	string	Named parties (claimants and defendants), comma-separated
judgment_text	string	Plain text of the full judgment body, whitespace-normalised
legislation_refs	string	Legislation and cases cited in the judgment, semicolon-separated canonical references
data_xml_url	string	URL of the structured AkomaNtoso XML source file
scraped_at	string	ISO 8601 timestamp when the record was scraped

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🔍 FAQ

How do I scrape UK court judgments? UK Court Judgments Scraper fetches data directly from The National Archives' public Atom feed and structured XML endpoints. Set your maxItems and page range, click Run, and get structured JSON output.

How much does UK Court Judgments Scraper cost to run? Pricing is pay-per-event: $0.10 per actor start, plus $0.00125 per judgment returned (1.25x the base rate). Scraping 1,000 judgments costs roughly $1.35. The actor runs without proxies, which keeps infrastructure costs low.

What courts are covered? The scraper covers all courts published on The National Archives Find Case Law: UK Supreme Court (UKSC), House of Lords (UKHL), Court of Appeal Civil and Criminal Divisions (EWCA), High Court divisions (EWHC), First-tier Tribunals, and Upper Tribunals. Coverage goes back to 2003, with some older decisions.

Can I filter by court or date? Date filtering is done via startPage and endPage — the Atom feed is in reverse chronological order so newer judgments are at lower page numbers. Court filtering can be applied downstream on the court field. Per-court API endpoints are also available if you need to target a specific court directly.

Does UK Court Judgments Scraper need proxies or a browser? Neither. The National Archives runs an official open-access API with no authentication requirement, no bot detection, and no geo-restriction. The scraper uses direct HTTP requests throughout.

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Need More Features?

Need additional fields, custom filtering, or a different UK legal data source? File an issue or get in touch.

Why Use UK Court Judgments Scraper?

• First UK case law scraper on Apify — zero competing actors for BAILII or TNA data as of 2026
• Structured output from an official source — extracts from TNA's own enriched AkomaNtoso XML, not scraped HTML, so citation data and party names are clean
• Affordable at scale — no proxies, no browser, no CAPTCHA costs. ~$1.35 per 1,000 judgments.