Public by law

The Federal Constitution provides that court hearings and the pronouncement of judgment are public, subject to exceptions laid down by law.¹ The Federal Supreme Court has held that this principle generally gives the public a right to inspect judgments after they have been pronounced. Privacy can justify restrictions. Where access requires anonymising a large number of judgments, the work must not impose a disproportionate burden on the court.

That right does not require every decision to appear online. The distinction matters: a judgment can be available in law and still be difficult to find in practice.

From rule to record

The Federal Supreme Court publishes its judgments online, generally in anonymised form, and selects leading decisions for its official collection. At cantonal level, publication practices differ. Researchers must navigate separate court websites, search systems, formats and request procedures. A judgment open to inspection may never appear in an online search.

Commercial databases provide valuable collection, indexing and research tools. But where finding a published judgment depends in practice on a subscription, the ability to understand the law also depends on the ability to pay for access.

Who pays for the gap

A person deciding whether to bring, defend or settle a claim needs to know how courts have treated comparable cases. Legislation states the rules; scholarship explains and tests them; judgments show how courts apply them to particular facts.

A repeat litigant may have a research budget, experienced counsel and years of accumulated knowledge. Someone facing a single dispute may have none of these. A searchable public collection cannot remove that difference, but it can give both access to the decisions on which an assessment should rest.

Swiss courts draw on earlier decisions without treating every judgment as formally binding in a later comparable case. Parties still need to understand the reasoning, recognise an established approach and identify a meaningful distinction. A decision matters because of what it says and how it fits the case, even where it has no formal binding force.

Technology changes the cost

Publication takes work. Names must be removed where required, identifying details assessed and the resulting text checked. Tools can assist with extraction, anonymisation and quality control. A person still needs to assess whether the remaining details could identify someone and whether the judgment remains intelligible.

Reducing that work makes wider publication more practical. The aim should be a judgment people can read, cite and check while respecting the privacy of those involved.

OpenCaseLaw

I built OpenCaseLaw to make published Swiss case law easier to find and use. It collects decisions from federal and cantonal courts in an open, searchable, machine-readable corpus. The data and code are open. Entries link to the originating public sources, and the platform describes its coverage and methods.

Search, extracted passages and tools that test propositions against cited decisions help a reader work with that material. They remain aids to research. A ranking does not establish legal importance; an extracted passage may omit a qualification; a citation may fail to support the proposition attached to it. Readers must be able to return to the judgment and examine the reasoning in context.

The collection can make available what courts have published. It cannot supply an unpublished judgment or make an incomplete public record complete. Its contribution is to make the available decisions easier to inspect, compare and use in reaching an informed conclusion.