Case law and legislative history

See how courts applied a provision, what the legislator intended, and what the regulator says about it, in the same search that finds the law.

Plan Premium, Team and Company.

Try it

Using Ansvar, find Dutch court decisions from 2025 onwards on dismissal for an urgent reason under Book 7 of the Dutch Civil Code, and give the court, decision date and citation for each.

More examples:

Using Ansvar, fetch the full text of the most relevant decision from that list and quote the passage that decides the case.

Using Ansvar, search for data protection authority guidance on employee monitoring in Germany and cite each guidance document.

What comes back

On these plans a normal search also returns court decisions, preparatory works and regulator guidance next to the law, each with its court or publisher, its date and a citation. Your assistant can then fetch one decision or one preparatory document by its reference; a very long document comes back as an excerpt with a link to the complete original.

For developers, the fields to read:

• Each evidence row's citation and its lookup hint, which names get_decision or get_preparatory_work with the arguments that fetch that exact row
• The court field on case-law rows, and the decision or issue date
• Search filters: court (exact match on the corpus's own value), date_from and date_to (full ISO dates, inclusive)

Which plan

Premium, Team and Company. On Free and Solo, search returns the law only, and the court and date filters are refused with a note naming the plan that includes them.

Tools

• search returns case law, preparatory works and guidance alongside the law on these plans.
• get_decision fetches one court decision by reference.
• get_preparatory_work fetches one preparatory document, such as a bill or committee report.
• search_guidance searches regulator guidance on its own.

Limits

• Coverage differs by country. Ask your assistant to check which countries have court decisions before you rely on an empty result.
• Some court-decision sources are not searchable on any plan by default; see Sources served on instruction.
• A search query is limited to 500 characters. Search one legal issue at a time rather than pasting a whole case description.
• The law still comes first in a result list. To see only decisions, ask your assistant to search the court-decision source on its own.