Public by law

The Federal Constitution says it plainly: hearings and the pronouncement of judgment are public.¹ The courts read that as more than an open courtroom. Their decisions must be accessible, in anonymised form where the protection of the parties requires it. Publication is part of open justice.

The principle is clear. The published record remains uneven.

From rule to record

The Federal Supreme Court makes its decisions available online, and leading decisions appear in the official collection.

At cantonal level, publication practice varies by canton and court. Some decisions appear promptly in searchable form. Some appear as scans that search engines cannot read. Others are available only on request.

Commercial databases collect and index part of the published record. When practical access depends on a subscription, however, that record is not equally available to all.

Who pays for the gap

Open case law is often discussed as a matter of transparency. It also has a direct use. Someone deciding whether to bring a claim wants to know how courts have treated comparable cases. Doctrine explains the rules. Decisions show how those rules have been applied.

That knowledge is unevenly held. A repeat litigant may have databases and institutional memory. Someone facing a single dispute may have neither. A usable public record narrows that gap.

Switzerland is not a common law precedent system. A court is not formally bound by every earlier decision in a comparable case. Yet courts consider prior decisions, parties reason from them and anyone valuing a claim needs to understand them. Lack of formal binding force does not make a decision irrelevant.

Technology changes the cost

Publication and anonymisation require resources and careful review. Modern tools can assist with extraction, redaction and quality checks, but confidentiality risks still require human judgment. Technology can reduce part of the burden. It does not make the work free or automatic.

opencaselaw.ch

I built OpenCaseLaw to make that public record easier to use. It collects decisions from Swiss courts and makes them searchable, openly and free of charge.

The platform stays deliberately modest: no interpretation, ranking or prediction. It makes the sources findable. Easier access can help a party test a claim, identify uncertainty and decide whether further work is justified. The platform does not decide. It makes the record available for judgment.