Swiss Case Law Open Dataset

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

991,000+ court decisions · 5,519 federal laws · 15,589 cantonal laws · 8.6 M resolved citation edges (9.2 M extracted) · 11.8 M statute references · 83,958 Botschaft amendment references (5,900+ verbatim Botschaften ingested, scaling) · daily RFC-6962 Merkle root + OpenTimestamps anchor (cryptographic provenance) · cli:ch + ECLI identifiers on every decision

Figures as of 2026-06-21 — corpus refreshed daily; live counts at opencaselaw.ch.

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 (5,900+ documents, ~410K FTS5-indexed paragraphs, scaling via Fedlex SPARQL discovery), per-article Botschaft digests for BV/BGFA, parliamentary debate transcripts for the Bundesverfassung, a resolved citation graph, and 43 MCP tools (41 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 43 MCP tools (41 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 — 991,000+ decisions from 1875 to today across 118 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: 841 Swiss-respondent (HUDOC) + general ECtHR Grand Chamber/Chamber/Committee — 2,840 judgments live (481 BGE-published EGMR translations, 841 HUDOC, 1,186 Chamber, 237 Committee, 95 Grand Chamber)
• Three official languages: German 463,012 (46.7%), French 446,869 (45.1%), Italian 81,796 (8.2%); schema r

... View full README on GitHub