Case law should be free to find
Judgments are public documents. Finding them should not require a subscription or even an account. What Obiter charges for is the work around them, not the record itself.
Judgments in England and Wales are public documents. The court gives them, The National Archives publishes them, and the reasoning in them binds or persuades every lawyer in the jurisdiction. And yet actually finding the right one has mostly meant either a commercial database subscription or a free search that stops short of being genuinely useful.
Find Case Law changed the important part. Since 2022, judgments have had a real public home, and the Open Justice Licence made the text reusable. What has not changed is the layer on top. Search across the corpus in a way a practitioner would call usable has stayed behind a paywall, so the record is public in principle and rented in practice.
What we are doing about it
Public search on this site will be free and will need no account. It runs over the same stored judgment corpus the signed-in workspace uses, so a student, a litigant in person, and a fee-earner in a matter will all be querying the same texts. When a hit opens, it opens the stored judgment, in full, with the acknowledgement the licence requires shown alongside it.
It is switched off on this site until the Find Case Law licence covers this domain. The corpus and the retrieval stack are already built; they serve the signed-in workspace today.
What we charge for instead
The paid product is the work around the record, not the record. Matters, the editor, citation and quote checks, redaction workflows, the audit trail. Those take infrastructure and judgement, and they cost money to run well. Search over public judgments does not need a tollbooth on top of it to function.
The same logic sits behind the open-source plan. The apps and the redaction detection models are being released as open source, because a redaction model improves fastest when anyone with a disclosure problem can run it, inspect it, and break it. Keeping that closed would not make the workspace more valuable. It would just make the detection worse.
The honest limits
Public search will cover judgments. Legislation is a different problem: provisions have structure, amendments, commencement, and versioning that judgments do not, and bolting them onto the case-law index would produce something misleading. It is in active development as its own slice of Search, not quietly missing.
And free does not mean unaccountable. The corpus is licensed, judgment pages stay out of search engines as the licence requires, and withdrawn or revised judgments are removed rather than left to go stale. The record being free to find only works if it is also right.
The bet is simple. If the public record is genuinely usable, the workspace has to earn its price on the work it does, not on a toll over texts that were already yours.