Reference corpus · 2 shelves
Judgments and legislation, from the bodies that publish them
Judgments from national and supranational courts, and the acts, regulations and statutory instruments beside them — searchable by what a case decided or what a rule requires, not only by name.
Shelf by shelf
One collection, 2 shelves. Each is filed and read separately — the sizes below are per shelf, not shares of a single pile.
- Judgments57k68% of the collection2.8 KB per record
- Legislation27k32% of the collection3.3 KB per record
What’s in it right now
Read from court and national reporting services, and from each government's own publication service. Judgments carry their formal citation, so the same case arriving from two publishers is recognised as one case rather than two. Where an instrument is published in several languages, the English text is used, so one law is one document rather than twenty-four.
Each breakdown is a share of the records that carry that field, counted across the whole collection rather than per shelf — so they do not add up to one another.
What one record carries
- Court
- Jurisdiction
- Decision date
- Parties
- Judgment text
- Instrument type
- In-force dates
- Amending history
- Provision text
Every record also keeps the address it was read from, so any answer built on it can be followed back to the original.
What you can do with it
Four things this collection is kept for, and the questions behind them.
Search by the point of law
Describe the issue and find the judgments that turned on it, without knowing the case name.
- Court and jurisdiction
- Decision date kept
- Formal citation attached
Find the rule, not an article about it
Search the actual instrument, and land on the section that answers the question.
Read the judgment itself
The full text where the court publishes one — not a headnote written by someone else.
Compare across borders
The same question asked of UK, US and EU material in a single search.
The kind of question it is filed to answer.
Case names are the hardest way to find a judgment and the only route most systems offer, and an obligation lives in one provision that almost every search answers with an article summarising it instead. Holding the judgment and the instrument themselves is what lets the answer be the case and the section.
And what comes back
- Judgments on the pointFound by the issue that was argued rather than by the name of the parties.
- The provision, not a summaryThe section that answers the question, from the instrument as its own publisher issued it.
- Court, jurisdiction and dateOn every judgment, so authority is obvious before you read a word of it.
- The citation to quoteCases and instruments carry their official reference, so a point can be cited and checked.
- 01Which judgments have turned on this issue, when I do not know a single case name?
- 02What does the instrument itself require here, rather than what a summary says it requires?
- 03When did this provision come into force, and has it since been amended?
- 04Which court decided this, in which jurisdiction, and when?
- 05How is the same obligation written in another jurisdiction?
Examples of what this collection is built to answer, not saved searches or results. What comes back depends on what has been read so far.
What it is not good for
known limits- It is not legal advice, and a judgment found is not a judgment that binds you.
- It cannot tell you whether a case is still good law. Nothing here tracks whether a decision has since been overruled or distinguished.
- Where an instrument is published in several languages, the English text is used — so a point turning on the wording of another language version is outside it.
Where it is used
Legal reads this shelf.
The legal workspace, on the roadmap, will read case law beside legislation and your own contracts, so an obligation can be traced from clause to statute.
Describe the issue
The point in dispute, in plain words — the case name and the instrument number are what you are trying to find.
Weigh the court, and check when it applied
Court, jurisdiction and date decide what a judgment is worth; in-force dates decide which version of a rule mattered.
Read the two together
The legal workspace, on the roadmap, will read case law beside legislation and your own matter files, with every claim linked back to the source.
Read, filed and kept current.
This collection is one shelf of the askFinz index — material read from the source and filed as the kind of thing it is, rather than as undifferentiated web pages. The counts above are read from the running system.