What this search cannot do, and the figures behind it
Every search here shows a short list of what it cannot do. This page holds the evidence behind that list: the counts, when they were measured, and how. The grey boxes are fetched from the search service as this page loads and printed word for word.
The short version
- This misses cases, including ones that would help you. It searches a stored copy of a public collection, not everything a court has decided.
- The case law stops on 30 September 2026. A thin or empty result about anything recent means the collection ends there, not that no such case exists. Check the last several months elsewhere.
- This cannot tell you whether a case is still good law. Nothing here checks whether a case was overruled, limited, or reversed.
- Keywords are not concepts. “petition” will not match “petitions”, and a case that makes your argument in different words will not appear in a word search.
- Concept search ranks part of the collection. More than one opinion in six was never added to the concept index and cannot appear in a concept ranking at any position, for any search.
- Some opinions that look covered by concept search were added from a short caption only, so their actual reasoning is not being matched.
- Some records hold little or no stored opinion text, so a word search cannot find them by what they say.
- The figures below have been corrected four times, twice up and twice down. Treat any single count of this gap as unverified. Every superseded figure, and what was wrong with it, is kept word for word in
docs/glo-coverage-note-history.md. - When part of a search fails, the page says so and shows no results. A failed search is never presented as a search that found nothing.
The measured text, live from the search service
Some of these searches return the same coverage text word for word. Identical text is printed once, under the name of every search that returned it. If one ever differs, both print in full.
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Word search
Matches the exact words you type in the stored opinion text, ranked by textual relevance.
Concept search
Ranks opinions whose meaning is close to what you describe, over the part of the collection that has been added to the concept index.
Merged search
Runs the word search and the concept search and combines the two ranked lists.
Case-name and citation search
Looking a record up by case name or citation does no ranking, so the concept-index gaps above do not apply to it. Two limits still do: it searches a stored copy of a public collection, and it says nothing about whether a case is still good law. A citation never loaded here will not be found here, even though the case exists in the court’s own records.
Citation references between cases
Where this site shows cases that cite an opinion, or cases it cites, that is a textual reference only: one opinion’s text names the other. It is not agreement, approval, treatment, validity, or a good-law check. It is also a bounded sample of a partial collection, so references to cases never loaded here are counted but not listed.