How the Supreme Court decides
Every judgment the Court has delivered since its establishment, read and checked against the original text. These are counts from that corpus, not estimates.
Data current to 10 April 2026 · 6,000 judgments
The Court today
The seven judges currently sitting. Portraits from the Judiciary of Kenya.
Judgments per year
The Court opened in 2011 with a handful of judgments and now delivers around eighty a year. Click a bar to browse that year.
How appeals end
Most appeals fail. A dismissal is the single likeliest outcome by a wide margin — worth knowing before advising a client to appeal.
⚠ What happened to the decision below
The citator signal: a judgment that was reversed should not be cited as good law. Extracted per judgment and under review — roughly one in eight of these labels conflicts with the case's own outcome, so treat the shape as indicative and the individual brief as authoritative.
1,240 appeals were allowed in whole or in part. Each is a decision below that needs checking before it is relied on.
Appeals allowed vs refused, by year
Whether the decision under appeal was set aside or left standing.
Split benches, by year
Judgments carrying a dissent or concurrence. The Court has become markedly more unanimous.
How long from filing to judgment
Filing year is read from the case number, judgment year from the decision. The Court disposes of most appeals within a year of them reaching it — median 1 year, though the tail runs to 22 years for old matters that arrive late.
The tail is old matters
Most appeals are disposed within a year of filing. The handful beyond six years are legacy matters that reached the Court late — including appeals dormant since the 1990s that only arrived after 2016.
Every authority the Court has cited
Every authority the Court has relied on more than once, ranked. Those in the corpus link to the brief; the count links to judgments mentioning it. A further 4,957 authorities were cited a single time — those are findable through search.
Who dissents
The Court is unanimous in the large majority of cases. These judges wrote separately most often.
Name variants in the source judgments are collapsed, so “Njoki Ndungu” and “N. Ndungu” count as one judge.
Bench size
Five judges is the standard bench; seven sits for the weightiest constitutional questions.
Most-interpreted legislation
What it hears
Counts are drawn from AI-extracted briefs of every Supreme Court judgment on Kenya Law, each checked against the source text — quotes matched verbatim and located to the page they appear on in the judgment rather than taken from the model. Figures describe what the corpus contains and are not a substitute for reading the judgments.