UK Case Law Scraper — Find Case Law Judgments API

Search UK court judgments and tribunal decisions from The National Archives' Find Case Law service (caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk) through its official public API — keyword, court, party, judge, date-range or exact-citation filters, clean structured records out, optional full judgment text. No login, no proxies, no HTML parsing.

Covers the UK Supreme Court, Privy Council, Court of Appeal, High Court, Family Court, Upper and First-tier Tribunals, Employment Appeal Tribunal and more — judgments from 2001 onwards (older for some courts), updated as courts publish.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
query	string	"negligence"	Free-text search across judgments. Leave empty to browse latest judgments matching the other filters. Ignored when citation is set.
citation	string	(empty)	Look up one judgment by its exact neutral citation, e.g. "[2024] UKSC 1". When set, this takes over the search: query, courts, party, judge and the date range are all ignored. Returns the exact citation match(es); falls back to raw (unfiltered) search hits if nothing matches exactly. See Citation lookup below.
courts	array (multi-select)	(empty = all)	Court/tribunal codes to filter by — see Court codes. Ignored when citation is set.
party	string	(empty)	Filter on a party's name (claimant, defendant, appellant, respondent...). Ignored when citation is set.
judge	string	(empty)	Filter on the judge's name. Ignored when citation is set.
fromDate	date	(empty)	Only judgments on/after this date. Ignored when citation is set.
toDate	date	(empty)	Only judgments on/before this date. Ignored when citation is set.
includeFullText	boolean	false	Fetch each judgment's XML and include parties, judges and the full judgment text. Slower and heavier output.
onlyNewSinceLastRun	boolean	false	Only output judgments not seen in previous runs with this flag. See Delta mode below.
maxItems	integer	50	Hard cap on judgments considered per run. 0 = no cap (use with care).
concurrency (Advanced)	integer	4	Parallel detail fetches when includeFullText is on. Keep low — this is a public government service.

What UK case-law data does this scraper extract?

One flat JSON record per judgment:

Field	Meaning
citation	Neutral citation, e.g. [2024] UKSC 1
title	Case name (parties as titled by the court)
court	Court / chamber name, e.g. Court of Appeal (Civil Division)
date	Judgment date (YYYY-MM-DD)
url	Judgment page on Find Case Law
pdfUrl	Official PDF
xmlUrl	Akoma Ntoso (LegalDocML) XML
slug	Court/year/number path, e.g. uksc/2024/1
fclId	Find Case Law document ID
contentHash	Content hash — detect judgment revisions
parties	Party names (with Include full text)
judges	Judge names where marked up (with Include full text)
fullText	Plain-text judgment body (with Include full text)
isNew	true on every pushed record — only present when Only new since last run is on
citationExactMatch	true/false — only present when Citation is set; see Citation lookup

How to scrape UK judgments with this Actor

1. Enter a search query (negligence, data protection, a party name...) — or leave it empty and filter by court/date only. Or set Citation to look up one specific judgment (see below).
2. Optionally restrict by courts (uksc, ewca/civ, ewhc/kb, ukeat, ...), party, judge, fromDate / toDate.
3. Turn on Include full text if you need parties, judges and the judgment body.
4. Turn on Only new since last run to skip (and avoid billing for) judgments already returned by a previous run — handy for polling the same query on a schedule.
5. Run and export JSON, CSV or Excel — or call it over the API:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("nomad-jobs/uk-case-law-scraper").call(run_input={
    "query": "negligence",
    "courts": ["uksc", "ewca/civ"],
    "fromDate": "2024-01-01",
    "maxItems": 100,
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["citation"], "|", item["title"], item["url"])

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/nomad-jobs~uk-case-law-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query": "negligence", "courts": ["uksc"], "maxItems": 50}'

Output example

{
  "source": "find-case-law",
  "citation": "[2024] UKSC 1",
  "title": "Paul and another v Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust",
  "court": "United Kingdom Supreme Court",
  "date": "2024-01-11",
  "url": "https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/uksc/2024/1",
  "pdfUrl": "https://assets.caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/uksc/2024/1/uksc_2024_1.pdf",
  "xmlUrl": "https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/uksc/2024/1/data.xml",
  "slug": "uksc/2024/1",
  "fclId": "gxdrmpqf",
  "parties": ["Paul and another", "Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust"],
  "judges": ["Lord Leggatt", "Lady Rose"],
  "fullText": "Hilary Term [2024] UKSC 1 On appeal from..."
}

isNew (delta mode) and citationExactMatch (citation lookup) are added on top of this shape when those inputs are used — see Delta mode and Citation lookup.

Court codes

uksc Supreme Court · ukpc Privy Council · ewca/civ, ewca/crim Court of Appeal · ewhc/kb, ewhc/ch, ewhc/admin, ewhc/comm, ewhc/fam, ewhc/pat, ewhc/tcc High Court divisions · ewfc Family Court · ewcop Court of Protection · ukut/iac, ukut/lc, ukut/tcc, ukut/aac Upper Tribunal · ukeat Employment Appeal Tribunal · ukftt/tc, ukftt/grc First-tier Tribunal.

The Courts input is a multi-select of exactly these codes — pick as many as you need, or leave empty for all courts.

Citation lookup

Set Citation to a neutral citation (e.g. [2024] UKSC 1) to look up one specific judgment instead of running a broad search. When set:

• query, courts, party, judge, fromDate and toDate are all ignored.
• The Actor searches Find Case Law for that citation text, then keeps only the result(s) whose citation matches exactly (whitespace/case-insensitive) — tagged "citationExactMatch": true.
• If nothing matches exactly (e.g. a slightly malformed citation), it falls back to returning the raw, unfiltered search hits for that text instead, tagged "citationExactMatch": false, so you still get something useful to inspect.

Delta mode

Turn on Only new since last run (onlyNewSinceLastRun) to have the Actor remember which judgments it has already returned (keyed by fclId, falling back to slug then citation) across runs, and skip judgments it has already seen.

• Skipped (already-seen) judgments are not pushed and not billed — only genuinely new judgments count toward maxItems billing and appear in the dataset.
• Every judgment that is pushed with this flag on is tagged "isNew": true.
• State is kept in a dedicated key-value store (separate from the run's default store) so it persists across scheduled runs of the same Actor.

Integrations

Export results as JSON, CSV or Excel, or wire this Actor into Make, Zapier or n8n; call it programmatically with run-sync-get-dataset-items; or use it from AI agents via the Apify MCP server.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.05 per Actor start and $0.004 per judgment returned. 100 judgments ≈ $0.45. No subscription — pay only for what you fetch.

Use cases

• Legal research: track new judgments by topic, court or judge
• Litigation intelligence: monitor cases naming a company or party
• Feed RAG / AI legal assistants with authoritative primary law
• Academic analysis of UK courts and tribunals
• Compliance and news alerting on precedent-setting decisions

FAQ

Is it legal to scrape this data? Yes — Find Case Law is The National Archives' official open service and this Actor uses only its documented public API. Judgments are Crown copyright, re-usable under the Open Justice Licence. Note: the licence requires attribution and does not cover programmatic computational analysis (e.g. bulk text/data mining) — that needs a (free) licence application to The National Archives. Retrieval, research, republication with attribution are fine; check the licence for your use case.

Do I need an API key or login? No. The Find Case Law public API is unauthenticated.

How far back does coverage go? Consistently from 2001–2003 onwards depending on court; the archive grows as The National Archives ingests older judgments.

How fresh is the data? Every run hits the live API — new judgments appear as courts publish them, often same-day.

Something broken or missing? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab — it is monitored and fixes ship fast.