One decision by juris doknr or ECLI, or by a dedup-merged CELEX alias.

: :path, so the segment may contain slashes. Every BGH doknr does ('BGH-Zivilsenate/XI_ZS/2001/XI_ZR_338-01A'), and until this converter went on the route each one 404'd in EVERY encoding — Starlette normalises %2F back to / before routing, so the escaped form failed exactly like the raw one. Both now resolve, and /v1/case?doknr=… is the third, unambiguous way in.

status — every response carries it, and there are three values.

"available" is a decision we hold: the body is what it has always been, with the full text and every metadata field.

"known_missing" is a decision we can prove EXISTS but whose text we do not have. This corpus is not complete, and the honest answer for a decision that several decisions we do hold cite by Aktenzeichen is not 404 — a 404 says "no such decision", which for this set is false. The key for such a lookup is the Aktenzeichen. The body is:

{"status": "known_missing",
 "aktenzeichen": "VI ZR 1/19",
 "court_hint": "BGH",            # INFERRED from how the citations name it
 "decided_hint": "2020-05-12",   # INFERRED, may be null
 "text_available": false,
 "sources": [{"source": "bverwg",       #: an OFFICIAL free source
              "url": "https://www.bverwg.de/de/100304B7AV4.03.0",
              "court": "BVerwG",        # as the SOURCE states it
              "decided": "2004-03-10",  # as the SOURCE states it
              "matched_on": "docket+court+date",
              "full_text_available": true}, ...],
 "cited_by": 7,
 "citers": [{"doknr", "court", "decided", "aktenzeichen", "url"}, ...],
 "note": "Existence confirmed by 7 citing decisions; full text not yet
          available."}

No text or paragraph field is present in that body — including with ?paragraphs=1, which asks for the text that is precisely what is missing. court_hint and decided_hint are read off the citing decisions' own wording; nobody has checked them against the decision itself, because the decision is what we do not have. Treat them as leads, not as metadata.

sources is the opposite kind of fact and is always present, [] when we have not found the decision anywhere. Each entry is an OFFICIAL, free source that we matched to this docket on the docket AND the court AND — when the citations supplied a date hint — a decision date within one day of it; matched_on says which of those two rules fired, and court/decided are what THAT SOURCE states, not what the citations infer. full_text_available marks a source carrying the decision's full text rather than only a reference.

"joined_with" is the third value and the one that is not a gap at all. The Court of Justice joins related cases and decides them in ONE judgment handed down under all of their case numbers, but EUR-Lex catalogs that judgment under the FIRST number only — so C-493/10 names a decision that exists, was published, and has no document of its own anywhere. We hold it, under C-411/10. The body is the known_missing body with status: "joined_with" and one field added:

{"status": "joined_with",
 "aktenzeichen": "C-493/10",
 "joined_with": {"aktenzeichen": "C-411/10",
                 "doknr": "62010CJ0411",
                 "court": "Europäischer Gerichtshof",
                 "decided": "2011-12-21",
                 "url": "https://recht.nulegal.eu/rechtsprechung/eugh/...",
                 "evidence": "In den verbundenen Rechtssachen C-411/10 und
                              C-493/10"},
 "text_available": false, ...}

text_available stays false and there is still no text field: the text is the LEAD's, and joined_with.url is where to fetch it (/v1/case/{doknr} on that doknr returns it with status: "available"). evidence is the lead judgment's own title line, quoted verbatim, so the relation can be checked rather than trusted. joined_with is present and null on a known_missing body.

An Aktenzeichen nothing in the corpus cites still answers 404, as does any other unknown key. If you can supply the full text or a Fundstelle for a known_missing decision, the HTML page for it (/rechtsprechung/az/{az}) has the contact route.