⚖️ Japanese court judgments — rulings from the Supreme Court down, now queryable
Points clés
- 📚 Coverage runs from September 1947 to March 2010, and is still growing — 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. The count moves daily (25,184 on 2026-10-18, 43,581 the next day), so this post does not pin a number: every response carries the live count and range in its
freshnessblock. Trust that. - 🔎 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.
Comment l'utiliser
- 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.
Liens associés
Exemples de prompt
- Find the five most recent Japanese rulings on copyright
- Which patent rulings did the IP High Court issue from 2005 onward?
- Read me the full text of case 平成21(行ケ)10117