caselaw-repo-1

# Swiss Case Law Open Dataset

**The complete machine-readable archive of Swiss case law and legislation — built for humans, designed for AI agents.**

**1,050,000+ decision records (~909,000 unique decisions after cross-identifier linkage) · 5,525 federal laws · 15,600 cantonal laws · 9.65 M resolved citation edges (10 M extracted) · 12.4 M statute references · 83,958 Botschaft amendment references (5,900+ verbatim Botschaften ingested, scaling) · daily RFC-6962 Merkle root + OpenTimestamps anchor (cryptographic provenance) · cli:ch + ECLI identifiers on every decision**

*Figures as of 2026-06-21 — corpus refreshed daily; live counts at [opencaselaw.ch](https://opencaselaw.ch).*

Spans **1875 to today**, covers every Swiss federal court and all 26 cantonal court systems (plus regulators: FINMA, ComCo, FDPIC, IndepBC, ElCom, PostCom, ComCom), mirrors federal legislation directly from **Fedlex SPARQL** and cantonal legislation by **direct portal scraping for all 26 cantons** (LexWork: 18 cantons; SIL: NE + JU; ZH OpenData; TI RL — the same publishing systems the cantons operate themselves) with **LexFind PDF as fallback** supplementing 4 cantons for laws missing from their primary portals and as the discovery catalog for 33,000+ legislative texts. Includes **83,958 Botschaft amendment references across 9,139 BBl publications**, a **Phase 2 verbatim Botschaft corpus** (5,900+ documents, ~410K FTS5-indexed paragraphs, scaling via Fedlex SPARQL discovery), per-article Botschaft digests for BV/BGFA, parliamentary debate transcripts for the Bundesverfassung, a **resolved citation graph**, and **43 MCP tools (41 remote in public mode + 2 local-only)** usable from Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Grok, or any MCP/function-calling client. **CC0 public-domain data, MIT-licensed code, no sign-up, no API keys, no paywall.**

[![CI](https://github.com/jonashertner/caselaw-repo-1/actions/workflows/ci.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/jonashertner/caselaw-repo-1/actions/workflows/ci.yml)
[![Dashboard](https://img.shields.io/badge/Dashboard-live-d1242f)](https://opencaselaw.ch)
[![HuggingFace](https://img.shields.io/badge/HuggingFace-dataset-blue)](https://huggingface.co/datasets/voilaj/swiss-caselaw)
[![MCP Toplist](https://mcptoplist.com/badge/ch.opencaselaw%2Fswiss-caselaw.svg)](https://mcptoplist.com/server/ch.opencaselaw%2Fswiss-caselaw)
[![Data License: CC0--1.0](https://img.shields.io/badge/Data_License-CC0--1.0-blue.svg)](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
[![Code License: MIT](https://img.shields.io/badge/Code_License-MIT-green.svg)](LICENSE)

---

## Why this exists

Swiss legal research today is **fragmented across paywalls, inaccessible to language models, and prohibitively expensive** for the people who need it most — law students, independent researchers, and anyone outside the major firms. Commercial databases (Weblaw, Swisslex, Legalis) charge hundreds of francs per month and still don't expose a clean API. LLMs hallucinate statute text because they have no authoritative source. Small cantons publish decisions in PDF archives nobody indexes.

OpenCaseLaw fixes this. **Every published Swiss court decision, every federal and cantonal law, the resolved citation graph between them, and 43 MCP tools (41 remote in public mode + 2 local-only) that let any modern LLM act as a Swiss legal research assistant — all free, all open, all refreshed automatically.**

## What you get

**Case law** — 1,050,000+ decision records (~909,000 unique decisions; cross-identifier duplicates retained and linked, never deleted) from 1875 to today across **118 courts**, full text + structured metadata, covering:
- All 7 federal courts (BGer, BVGer, BStGer, BPatGer, BGE, BGE historical, BGE-EGMR)
- Federal military court (Militärkassationsgericht / MKG, 1,244 decisions 1915–2025)
- All 26 cantonal court systems (first, second, and third instance)
- Regulatory decisions (FINMA, ComCo, FDPIC, IndepBC, ElCom, PostCom, ComCom)
- **ECHR/EGMR**: 841 Swiss-respondent (HUDOC) + general ECtHR Grand Chamber/Chamber/Committee — 2,840 judgments live (481 BGE-published EGMR translations, 841 HUDOC, 1,186 Chamber, 237 Committee, 95 Grand Chamber)
- Three official languages: German 463,012 (46.7%), French 446,869 (45.1%), Italian 81,796 (8.2%); schema reserves `rm` for Romansh
- Deduplicated via docket normalisation + content-length-aware merge
- Updated daily; BGer decisions available within ~15 minutes of court publication

**Legislation** — every Swiss law, federal and cantonal, locally mirrored with article-level indexing:
- 5,525 federal laws / ~133,359 articles in each of DE/FR/IT from the Fedlex SPARQL endpoint
- 15,600 cantonal laws / 361,430 articles, direct-scraped from all 26 cantons (LexWork covers 18, SIL covers 2, ZH OpenData covers ZH, TI~RL covers TI); LexFind PDF fallback supplements 4 cantons for laws missing from their primary portals
- Unified SQLite FTS5 search federates both corpora; sub-millisecond article lookup
- Monthly refresh on the 2nd of each month (the day after laws enter into force)
- 12.4 M resolved links from decisions to individual statute articles

**Citation graph** — the **only public large-scale citation graph of the Swiss legal system**:
- 9.65 M resolved decision-to-decision citation edges (10 M extracted) with confidence scores
- 12.4 M decision-to-statute links resolved against the current consolidated text
- Bidirectional lookup, appeal-chain resolution (Instanzenzug), leading-case ranking by citation authority
- Powers `find_leading_cases`, `find_citations`, `find_appeal_chain`, `analyze_legal_trend` (top: BGE 125 V 351 with 85,108 incoming citations)

**43 MCP tools (41 remote in public mode + 2 local-only)** — specialised research tools that run in your LLM of choice:
- Natural-language decision search (BM25 + synonym expansion + Haiku reranking, **MRR@10 = 0.647** on a 100-query golden set)
- Leading-case discovery, citation networks, appeal chains, jurisprudence evolution
- Federal + cantonal law article lookup, full-text search across both — with **colloquial→legal vocabulary expansion** (searching "Vaterschaftsurlaub" finds the statute even though it says "Urlaub des andern Elternteils") and **cross-language cantonal search** (German query finds French/Italian cantonal laws)
- Doctrine overviews (statute + authority-ranked BGEs + timeline + Botschaft reference)
- **Legislative history (Materialien)** — 83,958 Botschaft amendment references across 9,139 BBl publications and 33,465 distinct (statute, article) pairs; **Phase 2 verbatim Botschaft corpus** (5,900+ documents, ~410K FTS5-indexed paragraphs) accessible via `search_botschaft` (topical FTS5 across the verbatim corpus), `get_article_purpose` (verbatim Botschaft text for a specific article), and `get_article_history` (chronological timeline composing statute + Botschaft + leading cases + commentary); per-article digests (legislative intent, key arguments, design choices, rejected alternatives) for BV and BGFA; parliamentary debate transcripts for the BV. **Full verbatim ingest to ~25K Botschaften via Fedlex SPARQL discovery is scaling.**
- **Decision-structure access** — `get_decision_structure` (Sachverhalt + Erwägungen + Dispositiv + Regeste split), `get_erwaegung` (verbatim Schweizer-citation Einheit, e.g. `get_erwaegung("BGE 140 III 86", "2.3")`), `get_regeste` (official BGer/BVGer/BStGer head-note)
- Scholarly commentary lookup from OnlineKommentar.ch + OpenLegalCommentary.ch (1,131 commentaries)
- **Fallbearbeitung exam questions** generated from real BGE fact patterns, with hidden analysis for practice
- Draft mock decisions from fact patterns (research-only tool for grounding LLM outputs)
- Structured case briefs (regeste, Sachverhalt, Erwägungen, Dispositiv, cited statutes, authority)

**Multiple access paths** — same data, two distinct audiences:

*For LLM users, researchers and developers — full 24-tool surface:*
- Remote MCP server at `mcp.opencaselaw.ch` (SSE + Streamable HTTP) — 30-second setup in any MCP client (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Windsurf)
- [OpenAI-compatible tool definitions](docs/openai-tools.json) for Grok/xAI and any function-calling LLM API
- Local MCP server — full offline capability, 40 tools (38 remote in public mode + 2 local-only), ~65 GB disk
- 30-route REST API with [interactive documentation](https://mcp.opencaselaw.ch/api/docs) (Swagger UI + OpenAPI spec)
- Bulk Parquet download via the [HuggingFace dataset](https://huggingface.co/datasets/voilaj/swiss-caselaw) (~7 GB)
- Live dashboard + browsing UI at [opencaselaw.ch](https://opencaselaw.ch)

*For legal practitioners drafting documents — curated practitioner surface:*
- [**Word add-in**](https://word.opencaselaw.ch/install.html) — Search decisions and insert **correctly-formatted Swiss legal citations** directly in Word (no copy-paste). Click an Erwägung to insert it with the correct sub-citation; click a law § to insert that alinea. Free **Audit** scans the whole document for fabricated citations and bad pinpoints (deterministic, no LLM). **Pro tier** (Stripe-billed, CHF 5/month, 25 AI calls/day shared, structural PII redaction) adds four AI tools: **Verify** (single citation vs. full-text decision), **Strengthen** (paragraph x-ray with leading-case suggestions ranked by citation-graph centrality + commentary excerpts), **Find Support** (locate decisions that back an unsupported statement, scored 0–100), and **Reflect** (literary mirror on the whole document — one canonical work that frames the same human dilemma + one reflective question). Exposes ~8 of the 43 MCP tools (41 remote in public mode + 2 local-only) through the REST API, tuned for the write-your-brief workflow.

**Performance you can defend in a paper**:

| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Decision search quality | MRR@10 = 0.647 (online) / 0.470 (offline reproducible) · **+102 %** over baseline |
| Article lookup latency | < 1 ms (local FTS5) |
| BGer publication → searcha