overthelex/pl-court-decisions

Polish Court Decisions

The largest open dataset of Polish court decisions: 2,830,029 decisions with full texts across all court levels.

What Makes This Dataset Unique

Source	This dataset	Best on HF (JuDDGES)	Difference
Common courts	437,446	437,450 (pl-court-raw)	same source
Administrative courts	1,899,852	~1,800,000 (pl-nsa)	same source
Supreme Court + Constitutional Tribunal + KIO	492,731	0	+493K unique
Total	2,830,029	~2,237,450	+593K (+26%)

Key differentiator: SAOS API data

The 493K decisions from the SAOS API include Supreme Court, Constitutional Tribunal, and National Appeal Chamber rulings that are absent from all existing HuggingFace datasets, including JuDDGES, Multi_Legal_Pile, and LEXTREME.

Comparison with LEXTREME and Multi_Legal_Pile

• LEXTREME (joelniklaus/lextreme): Contains zero Polish court decisions. Polish data in LEXTREME is limited to MultiEURLEX topic classification.
• Multi_Legal_Pile (joelniklaus/Multi_Legal_Pile): Contains zero Polish caselaw. Only Polish legislation (89K docs from MARCELL).
• JuDDGES: pl-court-raw (437K common courts) + pl-nsa (~1.8M admin courts). Does not include Supreme Court, Constitutional Tribunal, or KIO decisions.

Loading the Data

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("overthelex/pl-court-decisions", split="train", streaming=True)

for row in ds.take(3):
    print(row["court_type"], row["case_number"], len(row["full_text"] or ""))

Sources

Source	Records	Court Types	Period	License
SAOS API	492,731	Supreme Court, Constitutional Tribunal, National Appeal Chamber, Common Courts	2000-2026	Public domain (Polish Copyright Act Art. 4)
JuDDGES/pl-court-raw	437,446	Common courts (district, regional, appellate)	2002-2025	CC BY 4.0
JuDDGES/pl-nsa	1,899,852	Administrative courts (WSA + NSA)	2004-2025	CC BY 4.0

Schema

Field	Type	Description
id	string	Unique record identifier
ecli	string	European Case Law Identifier
source	string	saos, hf-pl-court-raw, hf-pl-nsa
court_type	string	COMMON, SUPREME, CONSTITUTIONAL_TRIBUNAL, NATIONAL_APPEAL_CHAMBER
court_name	string	Court name
case_number	string	Docket / case number
decision_type	string	SENTENCE, RESOLUTION, DECISION, REGULATION, REASONS
decision_date	string	YYYY-MM-DD
judge	string	Presiding judge
keywords	list[string]	Legal keywords
legal_bases	list[string]	Legal bases cited
full_text	string	Full decision text

Data Quality

• 12,213 SAOS internal duplicates removed (kept longest text)
• 27,473 empty texts removed
• 153 micro-texts (<100 chars) removed

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}
}