# Welcome, El Salvador: case law and legislation

**Published:** September 18, 2026 | **Authors:** Cristian Correa

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El Salvador is live on Croma, our sixth country. It arrives with the two things people look up most in its legal system, case law and legislation, both from the Corte Suprema de Justicia. Four new endpoints behind the key you already use, and every one is also an MCP tool, so an agent can call them without you writing a client.

## Case law

About 200,000 rulings since 1951: the Corte Plena, the Supreme Court's four Salas (Constitutional, Civil, Criminal and Administrative), the second-instance Cámaras, the Tribunales de Sentencia and a set of Juzgados. Every ruling comes with its full text, the reference number, the court, the area of law, the kind of proceeding and of ruling, the decision, the facts, the crimes in criminal matters, and the headnotes the court's documentation center writes: each topic with what the court held on it.

Search by level of court, court, area of law, kind of proceeding or ruling, crime, reference number, year or date, or with free text that reaches into the body of every ruling.

## Legislation

More than 10,000 texts published in the Diario Oficial since 1821: the codes and laws, executive and institutional decrees, regulations, agreements and 6,450 municipal ordinances. Each one comes with:

- its consolidated text, and whether it is in force, expired or repealed,
- every amendment, with its decree, its dates, the Diario Oficial issue and its own text,
- the related rulings, which you read with the case law endpoint,
- the body that issued it, the area of law and, for ordinances, the municipality and department.

| Endpoint | What it answers |
| --- | --- |
| `csj-sv-rulings-search` | Search the rulings |
| `csj-sv-ruling` | One ruling in full, with its text |
| `csj-sv-laws-search` | Search laws, decrees, regulations and ordinances |
| `csj-sv-law` | One legal text in full, with its amendments and its versions |

## The original document, every time

We keep a copy of every document, byte for byte as the court published it. `document_url` points to that copy and `source_document_url` to the court's link, so if a link moves or disappears at the source, the document is still there.

For legislation this matters twice over. When the court incorporates an amendment, it rewrites the law's consolidated text in the same place. We do not replace the earlier version: we keep each one, and `document_versions` lists them all, oldest first. You can read a law as it stood before its latest amendment.

## An example

Rulings of the Salas on constitutional matters that deal with due process:

```bash
curl https://api.croma.run/sv/csj-sv/rulings-search/v1 \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CROMA_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": "debido proceso",
    "court_type": "sala",
    "subject": "constitucional"
  }'
```

Every result carries the `id` you pass to `csj-sv-ruling` to read the full text a range at a time. Change the path to `/sv/csj-sv/laws-search/v1` and send `{"type": "decretos legislativos", "status": "vigente"}` to list the laws in force, newest first.

## How current it is

Both collections refresh every day, and every response carries `as_of`, the date the data is current to. Rulings reach the documentation center weeks or months after they are handed down, sometimes years, so every day we check the last three years again. When the court rewrites a law in force, the new version is kept within a week.

The full archive is loading this week: recent rulings already answer, more than 40,000 today, and the rest back to 1951 arrives over the next two days. The complete legislation arrives within hours.

Fields never carry the parties' names. The text stays as the court published it, and the court already protects the identity of minors and victims.

The guide has every field: [Corte Suprema de Justicia](https://docs.usecroma.com/guides/el-salvador/csj). To call the endpoints from Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, connect [the MCP server](/mcp).

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