Public by law

In 2020, a man preparing for divorce asked Zug’s Higher Court for anonymised digital copies of judgments in several areas of family law issued since 2015. The court refused. He went to the Federal Supreme Court, which upheld his right to inspect the anonymised decisions, but found no federal right to have them sent to him. He could be required to visit the court registry and make copies there.¹

Article 30(3) of the Federal Constitution guarantees public court hearings and the public pronouncement of judgments, subject to statutory exceptions. This generally includes a right to inspect judgments afterwards. It does not require every decision to appear online.

From rule to record

A judgment may be available at a registry yet absent from search results. Even online, separate court websites, inconsistent formats and limited indexing can make it difficult to retrieve. A subscription can pay for research tools. It should not be what makes a public judgment findable in the first place.

Nor is a searchable collection necessarily complete. A search with no results can mean that no relevant decision was published, indexed or found. It does not establish that no court has addressed the question.

Who pays for the gap

That uncertainty can affect the terms of a settlement. Someone weighing an offer needs to know whether an opponent’s account of the law is sound. Judgments allow that account to be compared with reasons a court has actually given.

A repeat litigant may know the local practice, retain past decisions and fund detailed research. Someone facing a single dispute often starts without that accumulated knowledge. Open access cannot give both sides the same budget or experience. It can reduce the advantage gained simply by possessing the relevant decisions.

Finding them is the beginning of legal analysis. A similar outcome may rest on a different fact, a procedural obstacle or legislation since amended. A judgment’s weight depends on its reasons and its place in the wider case law, not its position in a list of search results.

Technology changes the cost

Making more judgments available requires careful work. Removing names is not enough if a description still identifies a child or a family. Removing too much can conceal the facts that explain the result. Publishing a judgment should protect the people involved without concealing why the court decided as it did.

Software can help extract text, remove identifying details and flag mistakes. Preparing judgments for publication when they are issued reduces the work needed later, when someone asks to read them.

OpenCaseLaw

I built OpenCaseLaw to make published Swiss case law easier to find and use. It brings decisions from federal and cantonal courts into an open, searchable, machine-readable corpus. The data and code are open; entries link to their original public sources. The platform describes its coverage and methods.

Search, extracted passages and tools that test claims against cited judgments help a reader decide what to examine. I want readers to be able to follow a quotation back to its source, read it in context and see whether it supports the answer. Checking should be easy even when it shows the answer is wrong.

The collection cannot supply unpublished judgments or repair gaps in its sources. It can give more readers the chance to examine and question the decisions that are available.