Sri Lanka Court Finder: Magistrate's Court by Area

Section 3 of the Judicature Act, No. 2 of 1978 lets the Minister divide Sri Lanka into judicial zones, judicial districts and judicial divisions, and attaches a court to two of those tiers: a Magistrate's Court to each judicial division, a District Court to each judicial district. The division is made by Order published in the Gazette, and the Order carries a Schedule that assigns territory not by town or by district but by Grama Niladhari division — the fourth and smallest tier of Sri Lanka's administrative geography. That is why “which court is mine?” is hard to answer from a map: the answer is written at a level of detail most maps never show.

There is no arithmetic on this page. There is a transcription and a join, and the page is worth using only if both are exactly what they claim. The transcription comes from a published consolidation of No. 1679/40 of 10.11.2010 with its 11 applied amendments. Parsing it by heading yields 34 judicial zones, 85 judicial districts and 105 judicial divisions — the counts the consolidation itself states, and the counts the tool re-derives from its own tables every time this page renders. A different count would mean the tables and the source have drifted, and the tool would say so rather than answer.

Inside each division the Schedule runs numbered items of the form “(3) the Grama Niladhari Divisions of Peliyagoda Gangabada (G. N. Div. No. 174), Pattiya East (G. N. Div. No. 173) … situated in the Divisional Secretary's Division of Kelaniya” . 421such items were parsed, naming close to 13,900 Grama Niladhari divisions. Each name is stripped of its printed parenthetical, folded to a comparable form, and joined to the national Grama Niladhari boundary set — the Survey Department data behind this site's GN Division Finder — scoped to the Divisional Secretariat division the item names. Where an exact match fails, a spelling-tolerant key is tried, then a token-order-insensitive key, then a bounded fuzzy match of edit distance two. Fuzzy matching never crosses a DS division.

Two wrinkles are handled deliberately. First, the printed G.N. Div. No.is the district-wide Census code (Madiwela 524, Depanama 529A), not the P-code the boundary set uses, so it is kept as a separate field and never used as a join key. Second, the Order names the DS divisions of its own day: Hikkaduwa has since been split into Hikkaduwa, Rathgama and Madampagama, Walapane into Walapane and Nildandahinna. For each item the join therefore also considers same-district DS divisions that visibly hold two or more of that item's own Grama Niladhari names.

The result is that 13,453 of 14,043 Grama Niladhari divisions resolve to a court. The remaining 590, the 280 printed names that match nothing, and the 24the Schedule names ambiguously are listed in the Coverage tab rather than dropped. Every answer is cross-checked a second way: for a DS division the Order does not split, the answer reached from the GN division's own allocation must equal the answer reached from the division headings alone. Those are independent parses of the same Schedule, so a disagreement would be a bug, not an ambiguity.

Counts re-derived from this page's own tables at render time and compared against the consolidation read on 2026-09-26.

No. 1679/40 of 10.11.2010 is the principal Order. Twelve Gazettes have since amended its Schedule. Eleven are applied in the text this page reads; No. 2027/22 is listed because it exists and must be recognised, but paragraph (3) of No. 2066/18 rescinded it in its entirety, so it is not applied.

The consolidation lists these for the instrument as a whole and does not footnote which one last touched a given clause, so this page does not claim to know that.

• Judicature Act, No. 2 of 1978 — section 3 (judicial zones, districts and divisions)
• JUSTICE — the Order under section 3, consolidated with its twelve amending Gazettes (unofficial working text)
• Gazette Extraordinary No. 1679/40 of 10.11.2010 — the principal Order (Negombo Law Society mirror, PDF)
• documents.gov.lk — the official Gazette archive (returned 404 for every Order path tried on 2026-09-26)
• Survey Department of Sri Lanka — national Grama Niladhari boundary set, via the Humanitarian Data Exchange

The Schedule was read on 2026-09-26and four allocations were spot-checked against the Gazette PDF independently of the consolidation: Madiwela, Kohuwala and Dehiwala East agree, and Peliyagoda Gangabada differs exactly where Gazette No. 2066/18 substituted the Gampaha Zone after that PDF's text. This page is a research aid, not legal advice, and it is no substitute for the Gazette or for a lawyer.