search-supreme-court-judgments

Search BC Supreme Court Judgments

Purpose

Search the public judgments database of the Supreme Court of British Columbia (BCSC — the superior trial court of BC) on bccourts.ca and return a paged list of matching decisions with neutral citation, case name, decision date, court level, and a direct URL to the full-text judgment HTML. Designed to work for any topic but with first-class support for landlord-tenant disputes that reached BCSC (typically via judicial review of Residential Tenancy Branch decisions, petitions for orders of possession, or foreclosure proceedings affecting tenants). Read-only — does not file, comment on, or otherwise mutate court records.

Naming disambiguation — this matters. The user prompt often says "BC Supreme Court of Canada" or "Supreme Court of Canada" when they actually mean the Supreme Court of British Columbia (BCSC, on bccourts.ca). The Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) is a separate federal apex court whose judgments live at decisions.scc-csc.ca, not on bccourts.ca, and the bccourts.ca search page explicitly tells you so. If the request is about BC law / a BC dispute / a BC tribunal review, you want BCSC on bccourts.ca — that's this skill. If the user genuinely needs SCC decisions, redirect to scc-csc.ca; this skill cannot serve them.

When to Use

• "Find recent BC Supreme Court judgments about residential tenancy / eviction / Residential Tenancy Branch judicial review."
• Boolean / phrase / case-name / citation / judge / docket / registry-location search of the official BC judgments index.
• Locating the canonical full-text HTML URL of a known BCSC decision (2024 BCSC 1234 → https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/sc/24/12/2024BCSC1234.htm).
• Date-bounded surveys (e.g. "all BCSC RTA judicial reviews in 2024").
• Distinguishing whether a tenancy dispute actually reached BCSC (vs. staying at the administrative tribunal or in Provincial Court Small Claims).

Not appropriate for: searching Supreme Court of Canada decisions (different domain — scc-csc.ca); searching BC Provincial Court judgments (different domain — provincialcourt.bc.ca); searching the Residential Tenancy Branch's own decisions (that's housing.gov.bc.ca, and most RTB arbitration decisions are not publicly indexed at all).

Workflow

The bccourts.ca judgments search is a classic ASP.NET WebForms page driven by a server-side __VIEWSTATE blob. There is no public JSON/REST API, no GET-with-query-string shortcut (verified — a GET to search_judgments.aspx?TabContainer$search$txtFullText=... returns the empty form, no results), and CanLII (the third-party mirror at canlii.org) is Datadome-protected and returns 403 to headless fetch. Therefore the browser is the only viable surface.

Stealth is not required: bccourts.ca is a public-sector site with no anti-bot. Residential proxy is not required. A bare browse cloud sessions create (no --verified, no --proxies) handles the workflow end-to-end and is the cheapest, fastest configuration. The validation run that produced this skill used --verified --proxies out of caution; subsequent runs should drop them.

1. Open a session and the search page

SID=$(browse cloud sessions create --keep-alive \
      | node -e "let s='';process.stdin.on('data',c=>s+=c).on('end',()=>process.stdout.write(JSON.parse(s.slice(s.indexOf('{'))).id))")
export BROWSE_SESSION="$SID"
browse open "https://www.bccourts.ca/search_judgments.aspx" --remote --session "$SID"
browse wait load --remote --session "$SID"

2. Fill the form via browse eval

The form lives inside an AJAX TabContainer. browse fill against the human-visible labels works but is brittle (the tab strip and validators occasionally intercept); browse eval against the DOM IDs is the reliable path.

browse eval "
(() => {
  document.getElementById('TabContainer_search_txtFullText').value = '\"Residential Tenancy Act\" AND \"judicial review\"';
  document.getElementById('TabContainer_search_radBCSC').checked = true;
  document.getElementById('TabContainer_search_txtFrom').value = '01/01/2023';
  document.getElementById('TabContainer_search_txtTo').value = '12/31/2025';
  return 'ok';
})()
" --remote --session "$SID"
browse click "#TabContainer_search_btnSubmit" --remote --session "$SID"
browse wait load --remote --session "$SID"

3. Read total count and extract result rows

The total result count is rendered as text on the page in the form Number found: <N> (the count is wrapped in the same <span> as a discrepancy-disclaimer sentence). The result table has DOM ID gvResults — header row at index 0, 50 result rows per page at indices 1..50, pager row at index 51 (or last). Each result row is a single <td> containing two <a> elements and a free-text block; cell count is always 1.

Each result row's text follows the shape:

{CaseName}, {YYYY} BCSC {####} – {YYYY/MM/DD} Supreme Court Highlighted more ...

Parse with /^(.+?), (\d{4}) (BCSC|BCCA) (\d+) – (\d{4}\/\d{2}\/\d{2}) (Supreme Court|Court of Appeal)/. The two anchors are:

1. Direct judgment HTML — https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/sc/{YY}/{HH}/{YYYY}BCSC{####}.htm where {YY} is the two-digit year and {HH} is floor(####/100) zero-padded to 2 digits (file-bucket folder). Corrections add a cor1/cor2 suffix before .htm. Example: 2025 BCSC 2362 (corrected) → /jdb-txt/sc/25/23/2025BCSC2362cor1.htm. Always take the URL from the anchor — do not synthesize it, because of cor1 suffixes and occasional folder anomalies.
2. Highlighter snippet URL — https://www.bccourts.ca/Highlighter.aspx?DocId={N}&Index=W%3A%5CInternet%5CsearchIndex&HitCount={K}&hits={hex-offsets} — produces a contextual preview with search terms bolded. Useful as a "preview" link.

browse eval "
(() => {
  const t = document.getElementById('gvResults');
  if (!t) {
    // 'No Results' page — there is no gvResults table at all
    const msg = document.body.textContent.match(/No Results/i);
    return JSON.stringify({total: 0, rows: [], reason: msg ? 'no_results' : 'unknown'});
  }
  const total = parseInt((document.body.textContent.match(/Number found:?\s*(\d+)/i)||[])[1] || '0', 10);
  const rows = [];
  // Skip header (i=0) and pager (last row).
  for (let i = 1; i < t.rows.length - 1; i++) {
    const r = t.rows[i];
    if (r.cells.length !== 1) continue;
    const txt = r.textContent.replace(/\s+/g,' ').trim();
    const m = txt.match(/^(.+?),\s+(\d{4})\s+(BCSC|BCCA)\s+(\d+)\s+–\s+(\d{4}\/\d{2}\/\d{2})/);
    const aJudg  = r.querySelector('a[href*=\"/jdb-txt/\"]');
    const aHlt   = r.querySelector('a[href*=\"Highlighter.aspx\"]');
    rows.push({
      case_name: m ? m[1] : null,
      citation:  m ? `${m[2]} ${m[3]} ${m[4]}` : null,
      court:     m ? m[3] : null,
      year:      m ? parseInt(m[2],10) : null,
      number:    m ? parseInt(m[4],10) : null,
      decision_date: m ? m[5].replace(/\//g,'-') : null,
      judgment_url:  aJudg ? aJudg.href : null,
      snippet_url:   aHlt  ? aHlt.href  : null
    });
  }
  return JSON.stringify({total, rows});
})()
" --remote --session "$SID"

4. Paginate

The pager row exposes JavaScript-postback anchors. There is no URL change between pages — the result set is reconstructed from __VIEWSTATE on the server. Pages are 50 results each. The visible pager shows pages 1..10 plus a ... link; clicking ... advances the visible window by 10. To jump to an arbitrary page, drive __doPostBack directly:

browse eval "__doPostBack('gvResults', 'Page\$3')" --remote --session "$SID"
browse wait load --remote --session "$SID"

For very wide queries (Number found: 3174 on the bare term tenancy, observed 2026-05-24), iterate until Math.ceil(total/50). A landlord-tenant filter ("Residential Tenancy Act" AND "judicial review" 2023-01-01 to 2025-12-31) returns ~144 results — three pages — which is typical.

5. Release the session

browse cloud sessions update "$SID" --status REQUEST_RELEASE

6. Recommended landlord-tenant query patterns

Tenancy disputes in BC follow a layered jurisdiction. Most disputes start at the Residential Tenancy Branch (RTB) — an administrative tribunal under the Residential Tenancy Act — and reach BCSC only by:

Always pair these with radBCSC to filter out the Court of Appeal layer. To capture appeals from BCSC judicial-review decisions, run the same query with radBoth and post-filter by court === 'BCCA'.

Site-Specific Gotchas

• "BC Supreme Court" ≠ "Supreme Court of Canada". Users (and LLMs) routinely conflate them. bccourts.ca is the BC superior trial court; the SCC is at scc-csc.ca and is out of scope for this skill. The search page itself says: "To search judgments of the Supreme Court of Canada or of other Canadian courts, please visit their websites." If your prompt is genuinely SCC-bound, fail loudly rather than returning BCSC results.
• Residential-tenancy law in BC mostly lives outside BCSC. The Residential Tenancy Branch handles ~99% of tenancy arbitration; its own decisions are not indexed on bccourts.ca and largely not public. A BCSC search for "landlord-tenant disputes" therefore returns the small slice that reached the superior court (judicial reviews, large-dollar petitions, foreclosure intersections). Set user expectations accordingly — a "0 results" or "low double-digit results" outcome can be the right answer for a narrow query.
• ASP.NET WebForms — no GET shortcut, no JSON API. The form is driven by __VIEWSTATE, __EVENTVALIDATION, __VIEWSTATEGENERATOR hidden inputs. A GET to search_judgments.aspx?TabContainer$search$txtFullText=... ignores the query string and serves the empty form. POST without a fresh viewstate gets rejected. Browser is mandatory.
• CanLII (third-party mirror) is Datadome-protected. browse cloud fetch https://www.canlii.org/... returns 403 with X-Datadome: protected. Don't try to route around bccourts.ca via canlii.org for headless flows — even with --proxies, you'll hit the captcha wall.
• Stealth + residential proxies are NOT needed. A bare session works. The validation run that produced this skill used --verified --proxies defensively, but every form-submit, pagination postback, and judgment-HTML GET succeeded against unproxied direct IPs in subsequent spot-checks. Save the cost.
• Date format is MM/DD/YYYY in the search inputs, even though the result rows render dates as ISO YYYY/MM/DD. Sending 2024-01-01 or 2024/01/01 in the From/To fields is silently ignored (no validation error — just no date filter applied). Always format as 01/01/2024.
• "Full Text" without operators is a phrase search, not a bag-of-words. Per the page's own help text: "In the absence of operators, the search engine will imply a phrase search." So residential tenancy act and "Residential Tenancy Act" return the same results; residential AND tenancy is what gets you the boolean expansion.
• Result rows are a single <td> of mixed text + anchors — not a multi-column table. Parse by regex on the row's text content; pull the judgment URL from the a[href*="/jdb-txt/"] anchor and the snippet preview from the a[href*="Highlighter.aspx"] anchor.
• Pagination is JS-only postback. Clicking page numbers fires __doPostBack('gvResults', 'Page$N'). The URL never changes (it stays search_judgments.aspx#SearchTitle), so the page can't be deep-linked. To collect all N pages of a wide query, drive browse eval "__doPostBack('gvResults', 'Page\$K')" for K = 2..ceil(total/50), calling wait load between each. The pager only renders 10 page links at a time + a ... link to advance the window — but __doPostBack accepts any page number, so jump directly.
• Judgment URL pattern is {YY}/{HH}/{YYYY}BCSC{####}.htm where {HH} = floor(####/100). Verified across 2026 BCSC 904 → 26/09/, 2025 BCSC 2082 → 25/20/, etc. But corrections add a cor1/cor2 suffix (e.g. 2025BCSC2362cor1.htm), and occasional cases have folder anomalies. Always take the anchor's href from gvResults rather than synthesizing the URL from the citation alone — synthesis will 404 on corrections.
• Zero results renders no gvResults table at all — just the text "No Results" on the page. Branch on document.getElementById('gvResults') === null to detect this case; otherwise the result-row loop iterates over undefined.
• There may be some discrepancies in the search results due to the way the historical data was compiled — this disclaimer is in the header of the gvResults table on every search. The site warns that older decisions (pre-~2000s) may have incomplete metadata. For dispositive legal research, cross-reference with CanLII (manually — see Datadome note above) or a paid service.
• Court Registry location dropdown has a stray leading blank entry before 100 Mile House. If round-tripping the dropdown value, the empty value="" is "no filter" (good); value="-- Unknown --" (the first option) is invalid — don't select it.
• The Court of Appeal and Supreme Court share the same search page, with radBCCA / radBCSC / radBoth as the discriminator. Despite the URL being search_judgments.aspx (no court qualifier), forgetting to select radBCSC and leaving the default returns both court levels mixed together, which is rarely what a "BC Supreme Court judgments" prompt wants.

Expected Output

{
  "query": {
    "full_text": "\"Residential Tenancy Act\" AND \"judicial review\"",
    "court": "BCSC",
    "date_from": "2023-01-01",
    "date_to": "2025-12-31"
  },
  "total_results": 144,
  "page": 1,
  "page_size": 50,
  "results": [
    {
      "case_name": "Banni v. Coast Foundation Society (1974) (Coast Mental Health)",
      "citation": "2025 BCSC 2362",
      "court": "BCSC",
      "year": 2025,
      "number": 2362,
      "decision_date": "2025-12-01",
      "judgment_url": "https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/sc/25/23/2025BCSC2362cor1.htm",
      "snippet_url": "https://www.bccourts.ca/Highlighter.aspx?DocId=..."
    },
    {
      "case_name": "Ferguson v. Candou Industries Ltd.",
      "citation": "2025 BCSC 2430",
      "court": "BCSC",
      "year": 2025,
      "number": 2430,
      "decision_date": "2025-11-28",
      "judgment_url": "https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/sc/25/24/2025BCSC2430.htm",
      "snippet_url": "https://www.bccourts.ca/Highlighter.aspx?DocId=..."
    }
  ]
}

Zero-results shape:

{
  "query": { "full_text": "xyzqqq-no-match", "court": "BCSC" },
  "total_results": 0,
  "page": 1,
  "page_size": 50,
  "results": [],
  "reason": "no_results"
}

Wrong-court warning (when the prompt asked for "Supreme Court of Canada" but the skill defaulted to BCSC):

{
  "warning": "wrong_court",
  "message": "The prompt mentioned 'Supreme Court of Canada' (SCC), which is a different court from the BC Supreme Court (BCSC) indexed at bccourts.ca. For SCC decisions, use https://decisions.scc-csc.ca. Returning BCSC results as a best-guess interpretation."
}