Pakistan Case Law

Full-text search of Pakistani judgments (Supreme Court, High Courts, Federal Shariat Court and tribunals, 1970 onward), with optional filters by court, judge, author, law report and year. Ranking follows how lawyers research: nearness to the legal point decides which cases are returned; among comparably-near cases, more senior court > larger bench > more recent > more cited. For the current state of the law, add year_from (e.g. 2025); use sort='court' for the most authoritative first. With no query, the filters list judgments newest first - e.g. court='Supreme Court' gives the latest Supreme Court judgments, journal='PLD' with year_from=year_to=2024 gives that volume, and sort='recently_added' alone shows what was added to the site most recently. Returns cases with id, title, citation, court, year, outcome, author (the judge who wrote it, when known) and the public URL; a keyword search also gives the number of judges on the bench and the words of the judgment that matched. For an exact report citation use caselaw_lookup_citation. To read a case, pass its id to caselaw_get_case.

Find judgments by the QUESTION they settle, rather than by words they contain. Every judgment summary on this corpus records the questions that judgment actually decides — e.g. "Does delay in lodging the FIR by itself entitle the accused to bail?" This searches those questions, so it matches the shape a legal problem arrives in rather than the vocabulary a 1987 bench happened to use. COVERAGE IS PARTIAL: only some judgments have a summary with questions yet (the response's `coverage_note` gives the current live ratio, which keeps growing). An empty result means no *summarised* judgment matched — it does NOT mean no such judgment exists. Fall back to caselaw_search, which covers the whole corpus. The questions are prepared from the judgment text. They are a finding aid, not a holding: cite the judgment, never the question. Pass an id to caselaw_get_case to read it.

Find the judgment(s) at an exact law-report citation. Example: journal='PLD', year=1995, page=34 → PLD 1995 Supreme Court 34. Omit page to list everything reported in that journal+year. Returns the same case shape as caselaw_search.

Fetch one judgment by id. section='summary' (default) returns metadata + the headnote (plain-language summary, the laws/provisions referred, and keyword tags) — read this first to judge relevance cheaply. section='full' additionally returns the judgment text; a long judgment arrives in its first part and says so. Long judgment: section='outline' gives a map (the judge's paragraph numbers, each separate opinion, the order), then paras='41-55' reads exactly those paragraphs (paras='2:3-5' = opinion 2, paragraphs 3-5, where separate opinions each restart their numbers), find='words' returns the paragraphs of this judgment that match, and start=N continues from a character position. These return the court's own words, never a summary.

Walk the citation graph FORWARD: list the in-corpus cases that THIS judgment cites (the precedents it relied on). Combine with caselaw_get_cited_by to traverse precedent backward and forward until a research question is resolved. Most useful on RECENT judgments: a 2024-25 case usually has nobody citing it yet, but its own citation list is a curated map of the established authority on the point.

Walk the citation graph BACKWARD: list later cases that cite THIS judgment (how it was subsequently treated — followed, distinguished, relied upon). Returns newest first. Most useful on OLDER or landmark judgments: it shows whether the case is still followed and where the principle has been applied since. A leading case can have hundreds of citing cases.

List the most-cited (landmark) judgments in the corpus, ranked by how many other cases cite them. A good entry point for the leading authorities on Pakistani law.