2026-10-18v1.89.0judicial_legal

⚖️ Japanese court judgments — 25,184 rulings, from the Supreme Court down, now queryable

Highlights

📚 25,184 rulings, September 1947 to March 2010 — sourced from the Japanese courts' own 裁判例検索 (case-law search), covering the Supreme Court, the High Courts, District Courts, Family Courts and the IP High Court. Keyword search returns matching rulings with surrounding context; a second tool reads the full text where one exists.
🔎 Filters — keyword, court, judgment-date range, sort (newest or oldest first) and paging. For example, patent rulings from the IP High Court from 2005 onward.
⚠️ This is not every Japanese judgment — the courts publish only rulings they consider precedential or of public interest, a few per cent of the total. Finding nothing does not mean no such ruling exists; it means it is not in the published case-law set.
📅 Recent years are still being filled — the newest ruling currently held is 18 March 2010. Later judgments are being added, and every response carries the coverage in force at the time (freshness.newest_date). Trust that, not this post.
🔤 Use search terms of three characters or more — one- and two-character terms cannot use the full-text index and fall back to a per-document scan, which is noticeably slower. A few rulings have no text layer and match on bibliographic fields only.

Search by keyword to get matching rulings with snippets (optionally filtered by court, date range and sort order).
Snippets are context only. To read a ruling in full, pass its case id to the full-text tool.
You must credit 裁判所 (courts.go.jp) when you use this data — the licence requires it; it is not a courtesy. See the licence link below.