overthelex/cz-court-decisions

Czech Court Decisions

The largest open dataset of Czech court decisions: 871,171 decisions with full texts across all court levels.

What Makes This Dataset Unique

Source	This dataset	Best on HF (Multi_Legal_Pile)	Difference
Lower courts (district, regional, high)	539,622	0	+540K unique
Supreme Court	111,977	111,977 (CzCDC in MLP)	same
Supreme Administrative Court	52,660	52,660 (CzCDC in MLP)	same
Constitutional Court	166,912	73,086 (CzCDC in MLP)	+94K
Total	871,171	296,652	+574K (+194%)

Key differentiator: rozhodnuti.justice.cz

The 540K lower court decisions from the Czech Ministry of Justice API are absent from all existing HuggingFace datasets.

Configs and Licensing

Config	Records	Courts	License
justice (default)	539,622	District, regional, high courts (2020-2026)	CC BY 4.0 (commercial OK)
czcdc	331,549	Supreme + Supreme Administrative + Constitutional (1993-2023)	CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (non-commercial)

Loading the Data

from datasets import load_dataset

# Lower courts (CC BY 4.0 -- commercial OK)
justice = load_dataset("overthelex/cz-court-decisions", "justice", split="train")

# Apex courts (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
czcdc = load_dataset("overthelex/cz-court-decisions", "czcdc", split="train")

Sources

justice config (CC BY 4.0):

Source	Records	Court Types	Period
rozhodnuti.justice.cz	539,622	District, regional, high courts	2020-2026

czcdc config (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0):

Source	Records	Court Types	Period
CzCDC 1.0	237,723	Supreme, Supreme Administrative, Constitutional	1993-2018
Paulik/Zenodo	93,826	Constitutional Court	1993-2023

Schema

Field	Type	Description
id	string	Unique record identifier
ecli	string	ECLI:CZ:... identifier
source	string	justice.cz, czcdc, paulik-zenodo
court_name	string	Court name
case_number	string	Docket / case number
decision_type	string	Type of decision
decision_date	string	YYYY-MM-DD
judge	string	Judge / rapporteur
subject	string	Subject matter
keywords	list[string]	Keywords
cited_provisions	list[string]	Cited legal provisions
full_text	string	Full decision text

Data Quality

• 0 duplicates (sources cover non-overlapping court levels)
• CzCDC and Paulik cover different time periods for Constitutional Court

Paper

This dataset is introduced in:

Multi-Legal-Bench: Evaluating LLMs on Legal Reasoning Across Jurisdictions, Languages, and Legal Traditions Volodymyr Ovcharov (2026). arXiv:2605.29738 [cs.CL]

Citation

@article{ovcharov2026multilegalbench,
  title={Multi-Legal-Bench: Evaluating LLMs on Legal Reasoning Across Jurisdictions, Languages, and Legal Traditions},
  author={Ovcharov, Volodymyr},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.29738},
  year={2026},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29738}
}