How we count Supreme Court citations

Last updated on August 8, 2026

Every section page in our Thai law library shows how many Supreme Court decisions cite that section. This page explains where those figures come from, how they are produced, what we have measured, and what we do not claim. If you are going to cite this resource, you should be able to check our working.

The dataset

The counts are computed over the firm’s own corpus of 83,652 distinct Supreme Court (Dika) decisions, spanning B.E. 2464 to 2569 (1921 to 2026). The decisions are held as Thai text. There is no English translation of any judgment in the corpus, so all analysis is performed on the Thai.

The statutory side covers 3,097 sections across four codes: the Civil and Commercial Code (1,847), the Civil Procedure Code (474), the Penal Code (453) and the Criminal Procedure Code (323).

How a citation is extracted

Thai judgments cite statute in a regular form: the statute is named, then its sections are listed. We parse that form directly rather than relying on keyword matching. In outline:

• Both the full code names and the standard abbreviations are recognised (ประมวลกฎหมายแพ่งและพาณิชย์ and ป.พ.พ., and so on).
• Section lists, ranges and paragraph references are expanded, so มาตรา 1656 และ 1657 yields two citations.
• Thai numerals are normalised, and the older ทวิ and ตรี numbering is mapped onto the slash form the codes now use, so มาตรา 340 ตรี and section 340/3 are recognised as the same provision.
• A statute named before a list of sections owns that list. This matters because a judgment’s disposition recites every statute in turn, and reading the nearest name in either direction attributes one Act’s sections to another.

What we deliberately exclude

Three classes of citation are excluded because attributing them to a current code would be wrong:

• Sections of other Acts. Where a judgment cites the Firearms Act, the Narcotics Act or any other statute, those sections are not recorded against a code.
• Sections of amending Acts. A reference to the Act Amending the Penal Code (No. 5) B.E. 2525, section 3, cites the amending Act, not section 3 of the Penal Code.
• The repealed 1908 Penal Code. The modern Penal Code entered into force on 1 January B.E. 2500. Decisions before that date citing “the Penal Code” mean กฎหมายลักษณะอาญา ร.ศ. 127, which is a different statute, and they are not counted against the current Code even where the source metadata labels them ป.อ.

How the listed decisions are chosen

The decisions shown under each section are selected automatically. They are weighted towards judgments that turn on the section, and away from judgments that merely recite it when passing sentence. A section named in a long list of statutes at the disposition stage scores low; a section named early, where a Dika headnote states the holding, scores high.

This selection is machine-made and is labelled as such on every page. It is not the same as an editorial judgment about which decisions matter, and we do not present it as one. Firm-reviewed lists are labelled separately.

Accuracy: what we have measured

We checked two independent random samples of 50 extracted citations by reading the Thai source text for each one.

• First sample: 49 of 50 correct. The single error attributed a section of an amending Act to the Code it amended.
• Second sample, after correcting that: 49 of 50 correct. The single error attributed a citation of the repealed 1908 Penal Code to the modern one.

Both classes of error have been corrected in the extractor. Separately, 99.4% of all extracted citations resolve to a section that actually exists in the relevant code. That is a check on structure, not on meaning: a wrong citation that happens to land on a real section number would pass it, which is why the hand-checked samples above are the figure that matters.

We have not re-measured precision since the most recent correction, and we would rather say so than quote a number we have not taken.

What these figures are not

• They are not official court statistics. They are computed by us, from our corpus, using the method above.
• Our corpus is large but we do not claim it is every decision the Supreme Court has ever issued.
• A count is a measure of how often a section is cited. It is not a measure of how important that section is, and it is certainly not legal advice about how a court would apply it.
• Where a judgment’s own text contains an error, our extraction faithfully reproduces it. We correct such cases when they are reported, and we do not silently alter the source.
• A citation may be to a section as it stood before it was amended. Judgments sometimes mark this explicitly, writing มาตรา 296 ทวิ (เดิม), “section 296 bis as it formerly stood”, and on that marker alone we can see at least 673 such citations. But many carry no marker at all, so what we can detect is a floor and not a measurement. We therefore do not report a per-section figure for it, because a precise-looking number here would imply we had found them all. Read a count as “the Court has cited this section number”, not “the Court has applied the text you are reading”.
• Some cited section numbers no longer exist. The 2560 rewrite of the Civil Procedure Code’s execution chapter repealed and renumbered a range of provisions, so older judgments cite sections such as 296 bis and 309 bis that are not in the current Code. Our library follows the current Code, and citations to repealed numbering therefore resolve to no page. They are counted in the dataset and simply have nowhere to appear.

The Thai text is what governs

On every section page, the Thai statutory text is authoritative and is reproduced from the text published by the Office of the Council of State. The English is an unofficial translation by ThaiLawOnline, provided so that the provision can be understood, and it is marked on each page as firm-verified or not yet firm-verified. Always rely on the Thai original for legal effect.

Corrections

If you find an error, in a translation, an annotation, a citation count or a listed decision, please tell us at info@thailawonline.com with the section number and the page address. We check reports against the Thai source and correct what is wrong. Corrections to statutory text and translations take priority over everything else on this site.

Reuse and citation

Thai statutes, regulations and court decisions are excluded from copyright by section 7 of the Copyright Act B.E. 2537, so the texts themselves are free to reuse. Our translations, annotations and the citation dataset are the firm’s work product and are offered for reuse with attribution to ThaiLawOnline and a link to the section page.

Every section page carries a “Cite this section” block with ready-made citations in plain, academic and Thai forms, a permalink, and an embed snippet.