SAOS is a repository of judgments from Polish courts of all kinds - common courts (district, regional and appellate), administrative courts, the Supreme Court of Poland, the Constitutional Tribunal and National Appeal Chamber. The saos package is an R interface to SAOS API. The API does not require an API key.

Keep in mind that SAOS and consequently a saos package are still under development. More functionalities will be added in the future, but some may be deprecated.

Right now you may install the package only from GitHub with devtools::install_github():

install.packages("devtools")
library(devtools)
install_github("bartekch/saos")

The core function is search_judgments(), which enables to search repository (through API) for judgments matching given query. Query handles a variety of parameters available in API. Following example will search for the first 100 judgments (starting from the latest) with any reference to words "dobra" and "osobiste", passed by common court:

library(saos)
judgments <- search_judgments(all = "dobra osobiste", 
                              courtType = "COMMON",
                              sortingField = "JUDGMENT_DATE",
                              sortingDirection = "DESC",
                              limit = 100)
class(judgments)
length(judgments)
str(judgments[[1]])

Search results do not include all available information about judgments. If you want to get all the details you need to use get_judgments() function:

judgments_details <- get_judgments(judgments)

Afterwards you could extract specific information with extract():

judges <- extract(judgments_details, "judges")
str(judges)
type <- extract(judgments_details, "judgmentType")
str(type)
date <- extract(judgments_details, "judgmentDate")
str(date)

To view the more complex tutorial see vignette:

vignette("saos", "saos")