Product · /v1/law/lookup?corpus=jury_instructions
What the jury will actually be told.
23,891 pattern instructions across 27 jurisdictions — 20 states and 7 federal courts of appeals — split to the individual instruction, each with its own validity window, source and content hash. The elements a plaintiff has to prove are in the instruction, not the statute, which is why this is a corpus and not an appendix.
Neither side is required to call all witnesses who may have information about the case or to produce all physical evidence that might be relevant.
- citation.display
- CALCRIM No. 300
- catchline
- All Available Evidence
- status
- active
- validFrom → validTo
- 2019-01-01 → present
- historyNote
- New January 2006
- temporalBasis
- compiled-edition
- provenance.sourceSystem
- courts.ca.gov
- provenance.versionLabel
- calcrim-2019
- provenance.contentHash
- b993c18cb17b50af885ab02076f4c7c76abd97756ed1f8b4efe9fb3221125189
California carries both compilations, keyed apart: ca-calcrim-300 is the criminal instruction, ca-caci-300 the civil one. A bare 300 resolves to neither — it comes back as a miss listing both.
check this record →[Name of plaintiff] claims that [he/she/nonbinary pronoun/it] and [name of defendant] entered into a contract for [insert brief description]…
- citation.display
- CACI No. 300
- catchline
- Breach of Contract—Introduction
- validFrom → validTo
- 2025-01-01 → present
- provenance.versionLabel
- caci-2025
- provenance.sourceSystem
- courts.ca.gov
The same number in the other book is a different instruction entirely. Editions are labelled caci-2025 and calcrim-2026 rather than by year alone, because one jurisdiction publishes two books and a bare year would collide them.
check this record →Same jurisdiction, same number, two different instructions from two different books. Ask for a bare 300 and the answer is a miss listing both keys — not a coin flip between them.
One instruction per record
Not a chapter, not a PDF. The unit is the instruction a judge would read to a jury, keyed and hashed on its own, so a citation resolves to exactly one thing.
Notes on use are carried, not merged
The committee's bench notes, sources and authorities travel alongside the instruction rather than inside the text. An agent that quotes the instruction quotes the instruction.
Reserved is served as reserved
An instruction the drafting committee has withdrawn or reserved comes back saying so. Where no standard text is provided, the record says that too — rather than rendering as an empty instruction, which reads like a bug and gets quoted like a fact.
Point-in-time, honestly
Dated by the compilation the publisher dated.
Most pattern instructions are not published with per-instruction effective dates. They are published as a dated compilation, so that is the boundary our validity windows carry, and every response declares it in temporalBasis. “The instruction as published in that compilation” is answerable with a hash for every one of them. A minority carry their own amendment date in the text and get it.
History accrues from the first compilation we hold forward. We do not reconstruct what an instruction said before that, and we never resolve a citation to a nearest edition — ask for a date before coverage begins and you get no_edition_on_file, with the coverage floor named in the message.
Live now
7 federal circuits, 20 states
Federal courts of appeals
States
The corpus last read its sources on 2026-09-25 and re-reads them monthly. Two of the jurisdictions above are excluded from that schedule on purpose: Connecticut and Oklahoma publish behind a robots.txt that disallows crawling, and the Seventh Circuit's civil instructions sit under a disallowed path, so it is absent entirely. We obey those files rather than route around them, which means those instructions are as of the date they were first read — and that date is in every response.
Instructions for the federal courts of appeals are keyed under the circuit, not under us: a circuit's pattern instructions bind neither a state nor the whole federal system, and flattening them into one federal bucket would let a Ninth Circuit instruction answer an Eleventh Circuit question.