Edu APIaustlii.edu.au ↗
Access Australian legal databases, browse cases by year, search by keyword, retrieve full judgment text, and look up citing cases via the AustLII API.
What is the Edu API?
The AustLII API exposes 7 endpoints for discovering, searching, and retrieving Australian legal case documents from austlii.edu.au. Use list_databases to enumerate all available courts and tribunals by jurisdiction, search_cases to run keyword queries across the full corpus, get_case_full_text to pull structured judgment metadata and complete plain-text body, and find_citing_cases to retrieve the LawCite citator record for any medium neutral citation.
No input parameters required.
curl -X GET 'https://api.parse.bot/scraper/6c24f681-35dd-4b59-b1c9-216b3fc16289/list_databases' \ -H 'X-API-Key: $PARSE_API_KEY'
Lists all available legal databases on AustLII organized by jurisdiction and category. Returns database names, URLs, and path identifiers that can be used with other endpoints.
No input parameters required.
{
"type": "object",
"fields": {
"databases": "array of objects with jurisdiction, category, database_name, url, and path"
},
"sample": {
"data": {
"databases": [
{
"url": "https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdb/au/cases/cth/HCA/",
"path": "cgi-bin/viewdb/au/cases/cth/HCA",
"category": "Cth Case law",
"jurisdiction": "Commonwealth of Australia",
"database_name": "High Court of Australia 1903-"
}
]
},
"status": "success"
}
}About the Edu API
Database and Case Discovery
The list_databases endpoint returns every legal database on AustLII as an array of objects, each carrying jurisdiction, category, database_name, url, and path. That path value is the key parameter for subsequent calls. Pass it to get_database_years to get an array of available years in descending order, then to list_cases — optionally filtered by a four-digit year — to receive an array of {title, url} pairs and a count of results.
Case Detail and Full Text
Given a case URL from list_cases or search_cases, get_case returns structured download links (rtf, pdf, eco_friendly_print) and a priority_download_url that resolves to RTF first, then eco-friendly print, then PDF. For the judgment content itself, get_case_full_text returns body (complete plain text including headnote, orders, and numbered paragraphs), medium_neutral_citation, parallel_citations, court, judgment_date, judges, and catchwords.
Search and Citation Lookup
search_cases accepts a query string and an optional zero-based offset for pagination; each page returns 10 results with title, url, database, date, and relevance score, plus a has_more boolean and total_count. find_citing_cases takes a medium neutral citation (e.g. [2015] VSCA 27), looks it up in LawCite, and returns only the cases that cite the target — citing_cases as an array of {case_name, citation} objects — along with a coverage_status of COMPLETE, PARTIAL, or UNAVAILABLE and an errors array explaining any gaps.
The Edu API is a managed, monitored endpoint for austlii.edu.au — not a raw scraper you maintain. Every endpoint is automatically health-checked on a schedule, and when austlii.edu.au changes and a check fails, the API is automatically queued for repair and re-verified. It is built to keep working as the site underneath it changes.
This isn't an official austlii.edu.au API — it's an independent, maintained REST wrapper over public data. Where the source has no official API (or only a limited one), Parse gives you a stable contract over a source that never promised one, and keeps it current. Need a new endpoint or field? You can revise it yourself in plain English and the agent rebuilds it against the live site in minutes — contributing the change back to the shared API is free.
Will this API break when the source site changes?+
Is this an official API from the source site?+
Can I fix or extend this API myself if I need a new endpoint or field?+
What happens if I call an endpoint that has an issue?+
- Build a citation-network graph by iterating
find_citing_casesacross a set of High Court decisions - Automate bulk download of RTF judgments for a specific court and year using
list_casesandget_case - Index AustLII full-text judgments into a search engine using
get_case_full_textfields likecatchwords,judges, andbody - Track how many cases a given piece of legislation has been cited in by running
search_caseswith statute name queries - Enumerate all available Federal Court databases and their year ranges using
list_databasesandget_database_years - Build a case-law monitoring feed filtered by court and year using
list_caseswith theyearparameter
| Tier | Price | Credits/month | Rate limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | 200 | 5 req/min |
| Hobby | $30/mo | 1,000 | 20 req/min |
| Developer | $100/mo | 5,000 | 100 req/min |
| Team | $300/mo | 20,000 | 300 req/min |
| Company | $1,000/mo | 100,000 | 500 req/min |
Each endpoint has a fixed posted price per successful call — most fall between 1 and 10 credits — shown on this API's page before you run it. Exceeding the rate limit returns a 429 response. Authenticate with the X-API-Key header.
Does AustLII have an official developer API?+
What does `find_citing_cases` return, and what does it exclude?+
find_citing_cases returns only the judicial decisions that cite the target case, drawn from LawCite's 'Cases Referring to this Case' section. It does not return cases the target itself cites, journal articles, law reform reports, or commentary. Each result includes case_name and the citing decision's citation. The coverage_status field indicates whether the LawCite record is COMPLETE, PARTIAL, or UNAVAILABLE, and the errors array explains any gaps.How does pagination work in `search_cases`?+
offset parameter to a multiple of 10 to step through pages (offset 0 = page 1, offset 10 = page 2, and so on). The response includes total_count so you can calculate how many pages exist, and has_more as a boolean shortcut.Does the API cover legislative text, law reform reports, or journal articles hosted on AustLII?+
Are there any known coverage limitations with `find_citing_cases`?+
coverage_status field will be PARTIAL or UNAVAILABLE and the errors array will explain why — for example, an unrecognized citation format or a court not indexed by LawCite. The endpoint reads only what LawCite has indexed; it does not supplement from other sources.