972’880 published Swiss court decisions

Every published Swiss court decision, every federal article, every cited authority — accessible to AI in one URL.

mcp.opencaselaw.ch · works in Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini and Copilot Studio · also via REST and bulk download.

Corpus snapshot

Legislation

+0 24h

laws locally indexed

Federal (Fedlex mirror)

Cantonal (22 portals + LexFind, 26 cantons)

Articles indexed

Fedlex SPARQL · 19 cantonal portals · LexFind fallback · FTS5 local

Graph & doctrine

+0 24h

resolved case-citation edges

Statute links

Scholarly commentaries

Languages DE · FR · IT

OnlineKommentar.ch

New since yesterday

Open-access legal scholarship

Beyond decisions and statutes: a unified, daily-rebuilt index of every Swiss legal publication that's licensed for free reuse — peer-reviewed journal articles, open commentaries, dissertations, and federal legal-policy reports. Every record carries explicit attribution + CC license, so LLMs grounded on this corpus respect the upstream authors' terms.

Total indexed

publications across all sources

Citation bridge

case citations resolved + … statute references
extracted from … full-text records (…% bridge coverage). Query both directions via find_scholarship_citing_decision and find_scholarship_citing_statute.

Sources live today

click to expand

Licensing

All publications are open-access. Per-source license terms:

view license breakdown

sui generis: CC-BY-SA 4.0
OnlineKommentar.ch: CC-BY 4.0
OpenLegalCommentary.ch: CC-BY-SA 4.0
The Good Board: author-permitted reuse
LEOH — Animal Law & One Health: CC-BY-ND 4.0
medialex: CC-BY-SA 4.0
EuZ (eizpublishing): CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0
Ancilla Iuris: CC-BY 4.0
cognitio: CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0
CFS — Criminologie, Forensique & Sécurité: CC-BY 4.0
ex/ante: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0
LeGes (Bundeskanzlei): federal publication — no copyright (Art. 5 URG)
Repositorium.ch: author-deposited OA
UNIGE Archive ouverte: per-record license
UniBE BORIS: per-record license
ETH Research Collection: per-record license
UniBas edoc: per-record license
UniNE LIBRA: per-record license
ZHAW digitalcollection: per-record license
FHNW IRF: per-record license
UniSG Alexandria: per-record license
e-periodica (ETH Library): historical periodicals, rightsstatements.org

Machine-readable catalog: /api/scholarship/licenses

Sources scaffolded for activation (corpus-completeness backlog)

Generic OAI-PMH harvester + per-source PDF resolvers (OJS citation_pdf_url + DSpace 7 REST + custom HTML scrapers) are in place. Remaining gaps below — most need outreach, not code:

UZH ZORA — UZH's OAI/REST endpoints return HTTP 504 (server-side timeout from any IP). UZH library outreach required to unlock ~10–30k UZH law records.
UNIL IRIS (was SERVAL) — repository migrated; no public OAI endpoint discovered yet. UNIL library outreach required.
USI Lugano, HSLU, FOLIA UniFR, UniLU — no OAI endpoints found via probe; each could add a few hundred records.
Italian-language coverage — only 215 Italian records (0.7% of corpus). Ticino-region sources (Rivista ticinese di diritto, Italian-language Swiss law journals) not yet identified.
Justice-Justiz-Giustizia — Swiss judges' association journal (OA portion only); custom scraper needed.
BJ Studien (Bundesamt für Justiz) — federal-commissioned legal research; custom scraper needed.
e-Helvetica federal deposits — theses + government reports at the Swiss National Library; OAI URL not found.

Verifiable, not just searchable

Citing an authority that doesn't exist — or doesn't say what's claimed — is the central failure mode of AI in legal work. The MCP server is built so every citation an AI writes resolves to a real, clickable source.

Canonical citations

Every result carries a server-built citation_string_de/fr/it + canonical_url against a deterministic decision_id. The LLM copies the string verbatim — it never formats a citation itself.

Active verification

check_claim_support and attest_response run a second model family over every reference + quoted text before the response leaves the server. Citations and pinpoints are checked against the corpus; quoted substrings must appear verbatim in the cited source.

Click-through

Every reference is a Markdown link to mcp.opencaselaw.ch/entscheid/<id>. The Word add-in turns it into a Word hyperlink. The document stays verifiable after handoff.

Connect

Pick your AI client. Paste the URL. Done.

Open Claude.ai or Claude Desktop → Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector.
Paste this URL:

https://mcp.opencaselaw.ch

Click Add. The 38 tools appear immediately.

Then ask: "Find Federal Supreme Court decisions on Art. 41 OR with the keyword Schadenersatz."

Pro / Max / Team / Enterprise plan needed for the Connectors UI. Free Claude users: see the Claude Code tab.

Settings → Apps → Advanced settings → enable Developer mode.
Click Create app, name it "Swiss Caselaw", paste this URL (auth: None):

https://mcp.opencaselaw.ch/sse

In any chat: + → Developer mode → select Swiss Caselaw.

Plus / Pro / Team / Enterprise / Edu plans. Best with GPT-5.3 (5.4 currently does not invoke MCP tools).

Add to ~/.cursor/mcp.json:

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

Restart Cursor. The 38 tools appear under swiss-caselaw.

Add to ~/.gemini/settings.json:

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

Restart Gemini CLI. Free — no plan required.

Single CLI command (works on the Claude Code free tier):

claude mcp add swiss-caselaw --transport sse https://mcp.opencaselaw.ch

No restart needed. The 38 tools are immediately invocable.

Open Microsoft Copilot Studio → your agent → Tools → Add a tool → New tool → Custom connector.
In Power Apps "New custom connector" → Import an OpenAPI from URL, paste:

https://mcp.opencaselaw.ch/api/openapi.json

Authentication: No authentication. Save → Update connector.
Back in Copilot Studio: Add tool → pick the new Swiss Case Law connector. The 30 REST routes (search, decisions, legislation, citations, doctrine, …) are now callable from your agent.

Spec is OpenAPI 3.0.3, WADL-converter clean (validated 2026-04-25 with LALIVE). M365 Copilot agents and Power Platform flows can both use the same connector.

30-route REST API. OpenAPI 3.0.3 spec at:

https://mcp.opencaselaw.ch/api/openapi.json

Interactive Swagger UI →

Or call directly:

curl -X POST https://mcp.opencaselaw.ch/api/search_decisions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query":"Art. 41 OR Schadenersatz","limit":5}'

Practitioner toolkit

Beyond the AI clients above: every decision is exportable as Word, BibTeX, or RIS. Every court has an Atom feed. The whole corpus is on Hugging Face. Everything CC0.

Word (.docx) Decision as a Word document — citation, Regeste, structured Erwägungen, ready to paste into a brief. Try sample → BibTeX Cite-ready @misc entry for LaTeX bibliographies and reference managers. Try sample → RIS Bibliographic record (TY-CASE) — drop straight into Zotero, EndNote, Mendeley. Try sample → Atom feed Subscribe in any feed reader — newest 50 decisions per court, refreshed daily. Subscribe → REST API Full OpenAPI 3.0.3 spec — search, citations, statutes, exports — usable from any language. Open docs → Bulk download Whole corpus as Parquet (~7 GB) on Hugging Face. Daily refresh, CC0. Download →

Latest

Recent Federal Supreme Court decisions

View all →

Upcoming federal statute revisions

View all →

Notable

Eight facts intrinsic to the published Swiss legal corpus — independent of when we scraped them.

Most-cited decision

—

Most-cited statute article

—

ECHR rulings on Switzerland

—

Oldest decision in the corpus

—

Verbatim Federal Council Botschaften

—

Three-language coverage

—

Citation graph size

—

Head-note coverage

—

Live from the corpus

Concrete examples of what your AI agent sees when it hits the MCP server.

Tool call

search_decisions(
  query="Mietrecht Kündigung Form",
  canton="ZH",
  limit=3
)

Response

4A_347/2023 · Bundesgericht · 2023

Ausserordentliche Kündigung nach Art. 266g OR; die Formvorschriften von Art. 266l Abs. 2 OR gelten auch bei …

4A_532/2022 · Bundesgericht · 2022

Zahlungsverzug des Mieters; das Vorgehen nach Art. 257d OR und die Zulässigkeit einer vorzeitigen Kündigung…

9C_89/2023 · Bundesgericht · 2023

Kündigungsschutz bei Familienwohnungen nach Art. 266m OR; Zustimmungserfordernis des Ehegatten…

Tool call

get_doctrine(
  query="Art. 41 OR"
)

Response

Art. 41 OR — Ausservertragliche Haftung

Statute text (DE/FR/IT) plus 12 authority-ranked BGEs spanning 1957–2024 and a doctrinal timeline.

Commentary excerpt:
„Die Tatbestandsvoraussetzungen der ausservertraglichen Haftung umfassen Schaden, Kausalität, Widerrechtlichkeit und Verschulden…“

Source: OnlineKommentar.ch · CC-BY-4.0