A unified, human-first search experience for European case law.
LegalSearch turns complex legal data into a fast, explainable workflow. It bridges natural language search and precise rule-building to make high‑signal legal research accessible for practitioners, students, and policy teams.
A product of the BISS Institute, in collaboration with the Maastricht University Law & Tech Lab.
Our mission
LegalSearch exists to lower the cognitive and technical barriers to legal research. It combines natural language input with explicit, auditable rules so every query can be understood, reproduced, and shared.
We aim to make cross‑source legal discovery feel fast and trustworthy while preserving the nuance that legal analysis demands. Our focus is on transparency: users should be able to see exactly why a result appears, change the underlying logic, and share the same view with others.
By unifying disparate sources under one consistent query language, we reduce friction between exploratory searching and rigorous legal verification.
What it does
The search bar parses countries, articles, years, ECLIs, and quoted keywords into structured rules you can verify.
Every query has a readable preview string that can be pasted back into the search bar to reproduce the exact same results.
Filters, sorting, and pagination state are encoded in the URL for precise, shareable results.
How it works
- 1. Parse & normalizeNatural language is parsed into structured rules, normalized to ISO‑3 codes and validated formats.
- 2. Execute combined searchA single combined endpoint executes dataset‑specific queries and merges the results.
- 3. Paginate with a cursorResults stream through an opaque cursor so pagination remains consistent across sources.
Backend API
The citations-api powers Case‑Explorer with a set of serverless endpoints for citation networks, ECHR search, statistics, summaries, and legal link extraction. All requests use the /api base path, return JSON with CORS headers, and surface errors as { "error": "..." }.
Data sources
European Court of Human Rights judgments, decisions, and related metadata. Supports articles, respondent states, application numbers, languages, and judgment/decision dates.
Dutch case law metadata indexed in Elasticsearch. Supports legal domains, court instances, document types, and selected laws.
Team
Collaborators
BISS develops applied AI systems for legal research, linking citations and metadata to help practitioners move from discovery to explanation.
The Law & Tech Lab explores how digital systems transform legal reasoning, regulation, and access to justice, and collaborates on tools that make legal knowledge more usable.