OpenCaseLaw

Open Swiss case law and legislation for legal research and AI.

1M+ decisions · all 26 cantons · 1875–today · citation graph · MCP + REST + CLI + Parquet · CC0 data · MIT code

Try the search · Chat with your AI · Automate research · Download the dataset · API documentation

What you can do

• Find Swiss decisions across federal and cantonal courts, in German, French and Italian.
• Trace citations between cases and identify the leading decisions on a question.
• Query case law and legislation from Claude, ChatGPT-compatible clients, or any MCP client.
• Save repeatable research scripts, inspect citation resolution, and preserve selected evidence with the research CLI.
• Download the corpus for legal NLP, retrieval and graph research.

Connect in 30 seconds

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "opencaselaw": {
      "url": "https://mcp.opencaselaw.ch/mcp"
    }
  }
}

No sign-up, no API key, read-only. 42 tools; setup guides for individual clients are at opencaselaw.ch/mcp.

Using Anthropic's Claude for Legal plugin? A Swiss playbook that makes its contract-review and NDA-triage skills work under Swiss law, every article verified against the statute mirror, is at opencaselaw.ch/claude/legal.local.md; see the setup guide.

Automate research

ocl is a small command-line client over the public research API, made for two jobs a chat window does badly: checking the citations in a draft, and keeping the evidence behind a memo in a folder you can share. It is on PyPI as opencaselaw-cli:

pipx install opencaselaw-cli        # or: uv tool install opencaselaw-cli
ocl citations resolve 'BGE 136 III 513' '4A_747/2012' 'BGE 999 III 1'
ocl bundle create 'Rachekündigung Art. 336 OR' --max-results 10 --passage 2 --law OR:336 --out evidence

The first prints, per reference, whether the decision exists, which one it is, and whether a requested Erwägung exists. The second saves the selected decisions, passages and statute articles into a folder with a plain-language INDEX.md and a hashed manifest.json. Everything comes back from the service unchanged: citation strings, passage text, source links. Search is bounded, and a citation check establishes existence, not that an authority supports a proposition. See the CLI guide.

Use MCP for conversations, the CLI or REST API for automation, and Parquet for corpus-scale analysis.

A real result

Question. When is a dismissal in retaliation for an employee asserting a claim abusive under Swiss law?

One call — search_decisions("missbräuchliche Kündigung Rachekündigung") returns 129 decisions, the leading one first:

BGE 136 III 513 (7 October 2010)

Art. 336 OR; missbräuchliche Kündigung. Der Arbeitnehmer ist vor einer Rachekündigung nur geschützt (Art. 336 Abs. 1 lit. d OR), sofern er nach Treu und Glauben annehmen kann, dass die von ihm geltend gemachten Ansprüche berechtigt sind. Es ist nicht erforderlich, dass sie tatsächlich begründet sind.