Mining 1.87 Million Legal Theses From Mexico's Supreme Court
Mexico's Supreme Court (SCJN) publishes legal theses in a web interface designed for one-at-a-time reading. We built a system to extract, structure, and archive 1.87 million records.
1.87M records structured
Legal Knowledge Locked Behind a Search Box
Mexico's Supreme Court (SCJN) publishes thousands of legal theses — binding interpretations of law that lawyers, judges, and researchers reference daily. These theses are available through a web interface, but it's designed for searching individual records, not for analysis across the entire corpus.
Legal researchers needed to identify patterns, track how interpretations evolved over decades, and build comprehensive reference databases. The only option was manual searches, one thesis at a time.
Systematic Extraction and Structuring
We built a data pipeline that systematically extracts legal theses from the SCJN's public interface, parses the semi-structured content into clean fields (epoch, type, court, subject matter, full text, citation), and stores them in a structured PostgreSQL database.
The pipeline handles pagination, rate limiting, and incremental updates — it can be re-run to capture new theses without re-processing the entire archive. The resulting dataset enables full-text search, cross-referencing by subject matter, and temporal analysis of legal interpretation trends.
Systematic Extraction and Structuring
We built a data pipeline that systematically extracts legal theses from the SCJN's public interface, parses the semi-structured content into clean fields (epoch, type, court, subject matter, full text, citation), and stores them in a structured PostgreSQL database.
The pipeline handles pagination, rate limiting, and incremental updates — it can be re-run to capture new theses without re-processing the entire archive. The resulting dataset enables full-text search, cross-referencing by subject matter, and temporal analysis of legal interpretation trends.
“1.87 million structured legal theses spanning decades of Mexican jurisprudence — fully searchable in seconds.”
1.87 Million Records, Fully Searchable
The archive contains 1.87 million structured legal theses spanning decades of Mexican jurisprudence. Legal researchers can now query the entire corpus in seconds, identify citation patterns, and track how specific legal interpretations have evolved over time.