LiveLaw APIlivelaw.in ↗
Access Supreme Court judgments, High Court news, legal digests, and categorized articles from LiveLaw.in via 7 structured endpoints.
What is the LiveLaw API?
The LiveLaw.in API exposes 7 endpoints covering Supreme Court judgments, High Court news, legal digests, and category-specific articles from India's LiveLaw.in. The get_sc_judgments endpoint lets you retrieve paginated judgment listings filtered by year, while get_article_detail returns full article text and premium status for any specific piece. Response objects include title, URL, summary, date, author, and year across all listing endpoints.
curl -X GET 'https://api.parse.bot/scraper/7e47d148-c39b-4769-86db-8d0c424a52dd/get_sc_judgments?year=2026&max_pages=1' \ -H 'X-API-Key: $PARSE_API_KEY'
Typed, relational, agent-ready
A generated client with real types, enums, and the links between objects — the structure a flat JSON response can't carry. Autocompletes in your editor and reads cleanly to coding agents.
- Fully typed · autocompletes
- Objects link to objects
- Typed errors & pagination
Typed Python client. Set up the SDK in your uv project, then pull this API’s typed client:
uv add parse-sdk uv run parse init uv run parse add --marketplace livelaw-in-api
uv run parse add --marketplace pulls a pinned snapshot of this canonical API — it won’t change underneath you. To customize it, subscribe and swap to your own copy.
"""LiveLaw API — Supreme Court judgments, High Court news, and legal digests."""
from parse_apis.livelaw_api import LiveLaw, ArticleNotFound
client = LiveLaw()
# Fetch recent Supreme Court judgments for 2026
for judgment in client.judgments.search_by_year(year=2026, max_pages=1, limit=3):
print(judgment.title, judgment.year)
# Browse top stories and drill into one article's full text
story = client.articlesummaries.top_stories(limit=1).first()
if story:
article = story.details()
print(article.title, article.is_premium, len(article.body))
# Fetch Bombay High Court news via constructible resource
bombay = client.highcourt(slug="bombay-high-court")
for item in bombay.list_news(limit=3):
print(item.title, item.url)
# Browse legal digests
for digest in client.digests.list(limit=3):
print(digest.title, digest.year)
# Typed error handling for a missing article
try:
bad_story = client.articlesummaries.by_category(category="consumer-cases", limit=1).first()
if bad_story:
detail = bad_story.details()
print(detail.title)
except ArticleNotFound as exc:
print(f"Article not found: {exc.slug}")
print("exercised: judgments.search_by_year / articlesummaries.top_stories / .details() / highcourt.list_news / digests.list / articlesummaries.by_category")
Fetch paginated list of Supreme Court judgments for a specific year. Iterates through listing pages on livelaw.in/sc-judgments and filters by year extracted from titles. Returns all matching judgments up to the max_pages limit. Each page contains ~12 items. If the target year is older, more pages may be needed to reach it.
| Param | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| year | integer | The year of judgments to extract. |
| max_pages | integer | Maximum number of listing pages to scan. |
{
"type": "object",
"fields": {
"year": "integer — the requested year",
"count": "integer — number of judgments found",
"judgments": "array of judgment objects with title, url, summary, date, author, year"
},
"sample": {
"data": {
"year": 2026,
"count": 12,
"judgments": [
{
"url": "https://www.livelaw.in/sc-judgments/2026-livelaw-sc-617-shishupal-shish-ram-and-ors-v-surjeet-and-ors-537511",
"date": "",
"year": 2026,
"title": "2026 LiveLaw (SC) 617 | SHISHUPAL @ SHISH RAM AND ORS. v. SURJEET AND ORS",
"author": "",
"summary": "'Homemakers Are Nation Builders' : Supreme Court Quantifies Homemaker Contribution As Rs 30K Per Month In Motor Accident Claims"
}
]
},
"status": "success"
}
}About the LiveLaw API
Supreme Court Judgments and Article Detail
The get_sc_judgments endpoint fetches paginated Supreme Court judgment listings filtered by the year parameter. Each result set includes title, url, summary, date, author, and year fields. The max_pages parameter controls how many listing pages are scanned — each page returns approximately 12 items. If the target year is older, more pages may need to be scanned before matching results appear. For full article content, get_article_detail accepts a slug or complete URL and returns the body, title, url, and an is_premium boolean. Body text will be empty for paywalled articles.
High Court News and Court-Specific Filtering
get_high_court_news returns paginated summaries across all Indian High Courts, while get_high_court_by_name narrows results to a specific court using a court_slug (for example, bombay-high-court or delhi-high-court). Both endpoints return the same item shape: title, url, summary, date, author, and year. The get_top_stories endpoint follows the same structure and covers LiveLaw's general top-story feed with page-level pagination.
Digests and Category Articles
get_digests returns weekly, monthly, and quarterly legal roundups from various courts, paginated using the page parameter. get_category_articles filters content by topic using a category slug — valid values include consumer-cases, ibc, news-updates, law-firms, and job-updates. An invalid category slug will produce a 404 upstream error, so callers should validate slugs before requesting. Both endpoints return item arrays with the standard title, url, summary, date, author, and year fields.
The LiveLaw API is a managed, monitored endpoint for livelaw.in — not a raw scraper you maintain. Every endpoint is automatically health-checked on a schedule, and when livelaw.in 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 livelaw.in 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 Supreme Court judgment tracker filtered by year using
get_sc_judgmentsto monitor annual output. - Detect paywalled content before display by checking the
is_premiumfield returned byget_article_detail. - Aggregate High Court news by jurisdiction using
get_high_court_by_namewith court-specific slugs. - Compile weekly or monthly legal digest feeds for newsletters using
get_digestswith pagination. - Create a legal topic feed for IBC or consumer case coverage via
get_category_articleswith theibcorconsumer-casesslug. - Extract structured metadata — title, date, author, summary — from LiveLaw top stories for legal research dashboards.
- Monitor job postings in the legal sector by polling
get_category_articleswith thejob-updatescategory.
| Tier | Price | Credits/month | Rate limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | 100 | 5 req/min |
| Hobby | $30/mo | 1,000 | 20 req/min |
| Developer | $100/mo | 5,000 | 100 req/min |
One credit = one API call regardless of which marketplace API you call. Exceeding the rate limit returns a 429 response. Authenticate with the X-API-Key header.
Does LiveLaw.in have an official developer API?+
What does `get_sc_judgments` return, and how does year filtering work?+
title, url, summary, date, author, and year — plus a top-level count and the requested year. Filtering is applied by matching the year extracted from judgment titles across listing pages. The max_pages parameter caps how many pages are scanned; if the target year is not recent, you may need to increase that limit to find all matching results.Will `get_article_detail` return the full body for all articles?+
body field will be empty when is_premium is true, reflecting LiveLaw's paywall on subscriber-only content. The title and url fields are always returned regardless of premium status.Does the API cover Tribunal or District Court judgments, or only Supreme and High Courts?+
get_sc_judgments and High Court news via get_high_court_news and get_high_court_by_name. Tribunal and District Court content is not included. You can fork this API on Parse and revise it to add an endpoint targeting those coverage areas.Are there limitations on how far back judgment data goes?+
get_sc_judgments endpoint scans listing pages up to the max_pages limit, so coverage of older years depends on how many pages are available on LiveLaw and how high you set that limit. Very old judgments may require a large max_pages value to retrieve, and not all historical entries are guaranteed to carry structured date or author fields.