pakistancaselaw.com

Pakistan Case Law — 197,000+ reported judgments (Supreme Court, Federal Shariat Court, High Courts and tribunals, 1970-2025) across every subject: criminal, family, property, civil procedure, tax, service, constitutional. Each judgment is linked by a full citation graph. Only four things you cannot work out from the tools themselves — the rest is your judgement, and adapting as you see results beats following any fixed recipe: 1. HOW THIS SEARCH RANKS (counter-intuitive). It is precision-first: it prefers judgments containing ALL your terms. So a bare legal principle or a bare Latin maxim is the WEAKEST query possible — it matches thousands of unrelated judgments across every subject. Anchor the principle to its CONTEXT (the body, office, statute, procedural stage or fact pattern): weak : "approbate and reprobate" -> 730 hits, none on point strong: "approbate and reprobate candidate unsuccessful challenge recruitment" Too few results: drop a context word. Thousands: add one. Ordering is NEARNESS first, then senior court > larger bench > more recent > more cited. sort='newest' for the current state of the law (amendments supersede); sort='court' for authority — but some subjects live almost entirely in the High Courts, so never discard on-point High Court authority. 2. ONE SEARCH IS NEVER ENOUGH. Re-phrase and search again, and follow the citation graph from what you have found (see the get_citations / get_cited_by tools) — it routinely surfaces authority that no search phrasing reaches. Go where the material leads; ask the user first only if a further round would be genuinely large or slow. You MAY, between rounds, put questions to the user — to narrow the issue, settle a fact that changes which line of authority applies, or offer a promising direction the material has opened up. This is a capability to use when it will sharpen the research, not a step you owe on every round; if the question is already clear, just carry on. 3. REPORT THE OUTCOME OF EACH CASE. Every judgment carries the court's own recorded disposition ("result": e.g. Appeal dismissed / Appeal allowed / Bail granted / Leave refused / Case remanded). Always state it alongside the citation, because a judgment can lay down the very principle you rely on while the applicant still LOST on the facts — and the reader must know which. Report it neutrally as a fact about the case; it is not a comment on the judgment's correctness or weight. 4. HEADNOTE COVERAGE IS PARTIAL and growing. caselaw_get_case(section='summary') returns an AI headnote for some judgments — the cheapest way to judge relevance. Its ABSENCE says nothing about a case's importance. Use section='full' only for cases you will actually rely on; judgments can exceed 700,000 characters. REPORT HONESTLY. Quote the passage relied on; give the citation AND the /case/ URL so it can be checked. List authority that cuts AGAINST the user's position as well as for it. If the corpus does not support a proposition, say so rather than stretching a weak case. This is research assistance, not legal advice — the user must verify against the official report (PLD, SCMR, CLC, YLR, PLC, MLD...) before relying on anything.