OpenCaseLaw research CLI

ocl checks Swiss case citations against the open OpenCaseLaw corpus (over a million published decisions of the Federal Supreme Court and the cantonal courts, federal and cantonal statutes) and keeps the evidence behind a memo. Dependency-free Python 3.10+; JSON when piped, readable text at a terminal.

pipx install opencaselaw-cli        # or: uv tool install opencaselaw-cli

Two jobs

Check the citations in a draft, written the way lawyers write them:

ocl citations resolve 'BGE 136 III 513 E. 2.3' 'BGer 4A_747/2012 vom 5. April 2013' \
    'Obergericht ZH LA210005 vom 15. Juni 2021' 'BGE 999 III 1'

Each reference comes back resolved, pinpoint_unavailable, discrepancy (the decision exists but the date or docket written next to it is wrong), missing, ambiguous or unrecognized, with the service's own citation strings and the verbatim text of the cited Erwägung. The rule behind it: the decision the service proposes must carry the label the author wrote; nothing is ever substituted, and no citation string is built by the client.

Keep the evidence behind a memo:

ocl bundle create 'Rachekündigung Art. 336 OR' --max-results 10 --passage 2 --law OR:336 --out evidence
ocl bundle verify evidence

A bundle folder holds the selected decisions (JSON and plain text), the named Erwägungen and statute articles, a plain-language INDEX.md, and a manifest.json with every request, timestamp, source link and SHA-256.

Also: ocl decisions search, ocl decisions get, ocl decisions passage, ocl laws get, ocl citations list, ocl cite. ocl <command> --help has examples for each.

For agents

The package ships an agent skill (skills/citation-check/SKILL.md): extract the citations from a draft, run ocl citations resolve --format jsonl, read the statuses, quote passages verbatim, report what did not resolve. Exit codes carry the verdict: 0 everything resolved; 2 invalid input; 3 transport or server failure; 4 something did not resolve or is not in the corpus.

Scope

Existence, identity and wording only. The tool never says that a decision supports a proposition, is still good law, or fits the facts. Results come from a hosted corpus that is rebuilt nightly, not from an offline snapshot; keep the returned source links and pagination metadata with your work.

Guide: https://opencaselaw.ch/research-cli.md · Site: https://opencaselaw.ch/cli/ · Changelog: CHANGELOG.md. Commands contact https://mcp.opencaselaw.ch by default; --base-url accepts another origin. Defaults can live in ~/.config/ocl/config or OCL_* variables; ocl completion zsh|bash|fish prints a completion script. The client spaces requests by at least 200 ms, retries at most twice by default and respects Retry-After up to 30 seconds.