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, 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 curre

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

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 body text (capped at ~40,000 chars; the response flags body_truncated/body_chars_total when longer).

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

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.