Search case briefs
Search 24 briefs by word, court, outcome, topic and year. Everything below runs in your browser — typing filters the list as you go, and the address bar keeps the search so you can pass it on.
Press / or Cmd/Ctrl-K to jump to the box · Esc clears it · filters and query are written into the address bar.
Nothing matches these filters.
Try fewer words, a different court, or clear the filters and start again.
How these results are ranked
Search is deterministic and inspectable: match, score, then sort. Nothing is hidden behind a black box.
- What is searched?
- Five fields per brief: the case name, the citation, the bench, the topics, and the summary. A match in the case name counts for more than a match in the summary, so “royal media” puts the Communications Commission case first rather than a brief that merely mentions it.
- How do multiple words behave?
- They are combined with AND. “jurisdiction supreme” returns only briefs containing both words; punctuation is treated as a space and capitalisation does not matter. One-letter words are ignored.
- What does an exact phrase buy me?
- Typing a phrase that appears word for word in a case name or its summary scores above the same words found apart, which is what puts the closest brief at the top of a relevance sort.
- What happens before I type anything?
- Relevance needs a query to rank against, so an empty box lists the newest briefs first. Choosing Newest or Oldest makes that ordering explicit rather than implied.
- What do the numbers on the chips mean?
- Each chip shows how many briefs your query and the other filters would leave behind, recomputed on every keystroke. A chip reading 0 is a combination that exists in the corpus but not in this result set — useful to know before you open a result.
- Can I share what I am looking at?
- Yes. The query, courts, outcomes, topics, decade and sort order are written into the address bar as you work, so copying the URL hands a colleague exactly this screen.
- Why only 24 briefs?
- This screen carries a sample index of 24 briefs taken from the 99,603-judgment corpus so that filtering can run entirely in the browser, with no request leaving the page. The live service searches the full index with the same engine.
Getting more out of search
A short list of habits that make the corpus feel smaller than it is.
Content words beat sentences: “jurisdiction supreme court” finds the same briefs as a long question, and the facets do the rest of the narrowing.
Court, outcome, topic and decade counts recompute as you filter, so an empty combination announces itself before you open a result.
A search that works is worth keeping. Save the query and filters and CaseHub will tell you when a new judgment falls inside it.