New UK Free Case Law Service: Judgmental

Judgmental appears to be a new free case law service for the UK.

Judgmental‘s content appears to include case law from the UK, ECJ, ECHR, and Ireland. The years of coverage seem to vary for each court. The Judgmental Website doesn’t appear to include a detailed description of its content, so one must browse in order to determine the coverage for a particular court.

According to the site’s homepage, Judgmental is being developed by “Francis Irving, James Cranch and Nick Bull, with advice and support from Francis Davey, Judith Townend, Stefan Magdalinski and others.”

The service distinguishes itself from BAILII on the ground that while BAILII seems to let Internet search engines (including Google) index only its metadata and full-text from only selected cases, Judgmental lets Google index the full text of all of its case law; Judgmental therefore enables the use of Google and other Internet search engines for full-text retrieval of much UK case law.

Judgmental cases appear to be available only in HTML format, and only individually; no bulk access seems to be available. For each case, some citation (noter-up) information — i.e., citations and links to citing and cited cases — is provided. Also, Judgmental appears not to provide any on-site search tool, so users must either browse to find the case they seek, or search using Internet search engines.

I’ve asked the developers whether they plan to provide bulk access, but they haven’t responded.

News about Judgmental is being posted on Twitter at @judgmentals.

HT @smithsam.