lahend.ee - Eesti kohtulahendite otsing

Search Estonian court decisions

Full-text search across Estonian LAW - both court decisions (civil, administrative and criminal rulings) and legislation (acts and their individual paragraphs), from Riigi Teataja, indexed by lahend.ee. Inflection-tolerant; wrap a phrase in "quotes" for an exact match. Every result carries a stable typed `id` - `ruling:<n>`, `law:<n>` or `section:<n>:<par>` - which `fetch` resolves. Use this when you need the legal position on something and do not yet know whether the answer is in a statute or i

Fetch a court decision by id

Retrieve the full text + metadata for any `id` returned by `search`. Handles all three kinds: `ruling:<n>` (a court decision with its linked companies), `law:<n>` (an act in its current redaktsioon, all paragraphs) and `section:<n>:<par>` (a single paragraph - prefer this over pulling a whole act). Returns Markdown plus the canonical lahend.ee URL.

Get one paragraph of an Estonian act

Return a single § of an Estonian act, addressed the way lawyers cite it: an abbreviation and a number, e.g. abbrev='KarS', paragrahv='199', or abbrev='TsMS', paragrahv='430'. This is the precise way to answer a legal question - pulling a whole act costs thousands of tokens and buries the answer. Text comes from the act's current redaktsioon.

Search the text of Estonian legislation, paragraph by paragraph

Full-text search across the paragraphs of every in-force Estonian act (4M+ sections). Answers 'which provision governs X' directly, returning the paragraphs themselves rather than acts you then have to read. Each hit carries a `section:` id for `fetch`.

Find Estonian acts

Find Estonian acts by title or abbreviation (KarS, TsMS, VÕS…). Returns each act with a `law:` id for `fetch`, its type, issuer and whether it is still in force. Use get_law_section when you already know the paragraph you want.

List the redaktsioonid of an act

List an act's redaktsioonid (consolidated versions) with their validity ranges, newest first. Use this to answer 'what did this say on date X' - Estonian law is amended constantly and the current text is often not the one that applied to the facts.

Find the case law applying a given paragraph

Given an act abbreviation and a §, return the court decisions that actually cite it, newest first, with a total count. Built from 3.05M citations extracted from the decision texts themselves. This answers 'how have the courts applied KarS § 199' - the question statute text alone cannot answer, and the reason to use lahend.ee over reading Riigi Teataja.

List the provisions a decision relies on

Given a ruling id (from `search`), list the statute paragraphs it cites, with the lõiked named and each § resolved to its act. Use it to see the legal basis of a decision without reading the whole judgment, then `fetch` a `section:` id for the provision text.

The most-litigated provisions in Estonian law

The statute paragraphs cited by the most court decisions, ranked. A map of where Estonian litigation actually happens, and a good starting point when exploring an unfamiliar area.

Public-authority documents about the companies in a ruling

Given a ruling id, return documents from Estonian public-authority document registers that name the same companies - procurement files, licences, correspondence, inspections. A court dispute and an authority's file about the same company are the two halves nobody normally sees together. Sourced from dokumendiregister.ee. This depends on the ruling having a company linked to it, which holds for about 19% of the corpus: parties are extracted from the decision text by registry code, and a judgment

Search court decisions with filters

Full-text ruling search with optional filters: court name, case type (civil/administrative/criminal), area of law (asja_kategooria) and a decision-date range. Returns a page of rulings with a total count. Use `list_courts` / `list_categories` to discover valid filter values. Two coverage limits worth knowing, because both are silent: - `companies` is populated on about 19% of rulings. Parties are extracted from the decision text by registry code, and many judgments name a company without ever s

Court decisions involving a company

Given an 8-digit Estonian registry code (registrikood), return every court decision that names that company, with its role (claimant/defendant/etc.) and the other parties. This company↔case-law join is unique to lahend.ee. Find a registry code via nimistu.ee or the nimistu MCP.

List Estonian courts

All Estonian courts that have published decisions, each with its ruling count. Use a court name as the `court` filter in `search_rulings`.

List areas of law

All areas of law (asja_kategooria) present in the corpus, each with its ruling count. Use a category as the `category` filter in `search_rulings`. These counts do NOT sum to the corpus size: about 26% of rulings carry no category, so they appear in `list_courts` totals and in unfiltered search but in no category here. Filtering by category silently excludes them.

Most recent court decisions

The newest published rulings (by decision date), across all courts and areas of law.

Search EU law in Estonian

Search EU regulations and directives, and Court of Justice / European Court of Human Rights judgments, by Estonian title or case number. The corpus is Estonian-language throughout: 94% of the Court of Justice's output is translated into Estonian, and essentially nothing indexes it in Estonian. Returns ids usable with eu_law_fetch.

Read an EU act in Estonian

Fetch an EU regulation or directive by CELEX (e.g. '32016R0679' for the GDPR), article by article, in Estonian. Also reports how many Estonian court decisions cite it and which articles they lean on - the part EUR-Lex cannot answer.

Find Estonian case law applying an EU instrument

Given a CELEX (an act like '32016R0679', or a Court of Justice judgment like '62014CJ0362'), return the Estonian court decisions that cite it. This is the join no other source publishes: EUR-Lex knows the EU instrument, Riigi Teataja knows the Estonian decision, and nobody connects them.

List the EU law a decision relies on

Given an Estonian ruling id (from `search`), list the EU instruments it cites - regulations, directives and Court of Justice judgments - with the articles named where the decision names them.

The EU instruments Estonian courts apply most

Ranked by how many Estonian decisions cite them. A good starting point for 'which EU law actually matters in Estonian practice' - the answer is concentrated in consumer protection, jurisdiction, asylum and agriculture rather than spread evenly.