Where the data comes from, and what is not there yet.
Transparency is what separates research you can trust from well-written text. This page explains where each decision comes from, how to get back to the original document, and what we are still building.
Court decisions, legislation and legal documents remain in Portuguese.
Portuguese coverage is growing. IAJUS.pt is live with access by invitation, and the collection grows court by court. This page describes the method, and it says where coverage is not yet complete.
Origin and status of each source, no shortcuts
Each result identifies its origin and links to it when a stable per-document link exists. A page is presented as an official source only when the server has verified it. A historical mirror keeps that label and is never promoted to an official source. You can open and check the document without confusing its legal origin with the place where the copy was found.
Not every source is Portuguese, and not every source enacted what it publishes. Besides the Diário da República, where most legislation comes from, the collection gathers the official journals of the Azores and Madeira and EUR-Lex, which is European Union law and not Portuguese law. A small share comes through the Lisbon District Prosecutor-General's Office (PGDL), which republishes legislation rather than enacting it. There, the link leads to the text as the PGDL republishes it, and the official journal remains the authoritative text.
If what IAJUS shows differs from the official document, the official document prevails. That is why the link to the source is not an extra: it is what lets you check our work.
Case law
The portals and document databases of the Portuguese courts themselves.
Supreme Court of Justice (Supremo Tribunal de Justiça)
Constitutional Court (Tribunal Constitucional): the DGSI database is a historical mirror, and tribunalconstitucional.pt is the official source. The years held are listed on the coverage page.
Central Administrative Courts, South and North (Tribunais Centrais Administrativos)
Court of Auditors and Court of Conflicts (Tribunal de Contas, Tribunal dos Conflitos)
An ECLI-format identifier constructed by IAJUS from the document's identifier at the source. It is not the official Portuguese ECLI and is not assigned by the court.
Legislation (collected, not yet searchable)
Official journals as the source, at the level of each act's metadata. The acts are in the collection, but the Portuguese service does not search them: today it returns case law.
Diário da República (DRE), where most acts come from
Official journals of the Azores and Madeira
EUR-Lex, which is European Union law and not Portuguese law
Lisbon District Prosecutor-General's Office, which republishes acts rather than enacting them
No consolidated full text in the collection yet
No ELI identifier, and no search of legislation in the service
Never a private repository of laws
Legal scholarship (not yet in the collection)
There are no works of Portuguese legal scholarship in the collection. The admission rule is written; no work has entered yet.
No work of Portuguese legal scholarship in the collection today
Scientific repositories and journals with an explicit open licence
Bibliographic reference always visible, when one exists
A protected work does not enter without a licence that allows it
What goes in, and what does not
In case law, the focus is the judgment of a panel of judges (acórdão). We collect the collegiate decisions of the higher courts and the Courts of Appeal, including decisions that settle or harmonise case law. Decisions by a single judge are not part of this collection.
In legislation, there is no year limit. An act from the 1950s that still applies is as relevant as one from this year, so we do not cut the collection by date. A status is shown as verified only when the consulted source declares it and the service records that verification, never because of a date.
On the status of an act, we only say what the source says. For most acts the Diário da República does not declare a status, and the collection does not invent one: it stays undetermined. The collection does not hold the consolidated text of any act, so the applicable wording must always be confirmed in the Diário da República, not here.
Sign-in, security and your data
Sign-in through your IAJUS account. AI assistants connect to IAJUS.pt with OAuth 2.1: the assistant opens the sign-in page at app.iajus.com.br and you sign in with your IAJUS account. There is no static key to paste into code. Without authentication, the server refuses the connection on purpose. You can disconnect whenever you like.
Your contact details. We use your details to reply to you and, if you allow it, to contact you about access to IAJUS.pt. You can withdraw consent at any time, and you can ask for access to, correction of or deletion of your data by writing to privacidade@iajus.pt. If you believe your rights have not been respected, you can complain to the Portuguese data protection authority, the Comissão Nacional de Proteção de Dados (CNPD).
We are building Portuguese coverage court by court. While a court or a period is incomplete, we say so: we would rather admit a gap than claim to have what we do not yet have.
Why do we publish the volume but not completeness? Because volume can be measured and completeness, today, cannot. We say how many decisions are in the collection and on which day that was measured, and we show the breakdown court by court (Portuguese). What we do not say is that they are all there: the total published by the official portals has not been measured, so we do not claim complete coverage of any court or period. A large number still proves nothing to someone who needs to support an argument: confirm the document at the source indicated and check whether the service has classified it as official.
Early access
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