Swiss Case Law Open Dataset

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

971,000+ court decisions · 5,516 federal laws · 15,722 cantonal laws · 8.09 M resolved citation edges · 11.26 M statute references · 83,958 Botschaft amendment references (459 verbatim Botschaften ingested, scaling)

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 (459 documents, 76K FTS5-indexed paragraphs as of 2026-05-11, scaling toward ~25K via Fedlex SPARQL discovery), per-article Botschaft digests for BV/BGFA, parliamentary debate transcripts for the Bundesverfassung, a resolved citation graph, and 35 MCP tools (33 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.

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 35 MCP tools (33 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 — 971,700+ decisions from 1875 to today across 108 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: 834 Swiss-respondent (HUDOC) + general ECtHR Grand Chamber/Chamber/Committee (1,421 judgments live, full-corpus backfill in progress)
• Three official languages: German 449,758 (46.3%), French 441,257 (45.4%), Italian 80,717 (8.3%); 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:

• 5,516 federal laws / ~133,468 articles in each of DE/FR/IT from the Fedlex SPARQL endpoint
• 15,722 cantonal laws / 353,437 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)
• 11.26 M resolved links from decisions to individual statute articles

Citation graph — the only public large-scale citation graph of the Swiss legal system:

• 8.09 M resolved decision-to-decision citation edges with confidence scores
• 11.26 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)

35 MCP tools (33 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 (459 documents, 76K FTS5-indexed paragraphs as of 2026-05-11) 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 (1,058 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 for Grok/xAI and any function-calling LLM API
• Local MCP server — full offline capability, 35 tools (33 remote in public mode + 2 local-only), ~65 GB disk
• 30-route REST API with interactive documentation (Swagger UI + OpenAPI spec)
• Bulk Parquet download via the HuggingFace dataset (~7 GB)
• Live dashboard + browsing UI at opencaselaw.ch

For legal practitioners drafting documents — curated practitioner surface:

• Word add-in — 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 35 MCP tools (33 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: