• Unreported judgments are decisions of the courts that have not been published
• An unreported case may be cited as an authority but it is less persuasive than a reported decision. Although there is debate about the precedent value of unreported decisions, in practice and in academia they are heavily used as they may contain the only statement of the law on a particular subject.
• Since the late 1990s they have only been made available online. Earlier judgments were made available as paper pamphlets
• They are often recent decisions and may be reported in due course

Australian unreported judgments are available in Lexis Advance and Westlaw AU. They are also published on AustLII and on various government websites including those of the court delivering the judgment. Reliable sources are listed in the panel on the right.

You can also find unreported judgments from the Supreme Court of Western Australia (1958-1990, some issues missing) in the Beasley Law Library, third floor, law reports collection. 

TOP TIP: Always check if an unreported decision has subsequently been reported. For more information in relation to this, please see the Case Law examples in our AGLC4 Library Guide in the TOP TIP ABOUT UNREPORTED CASES section. 

Please continue reading for an overview of the different unreported cases you can come across.  

When a judgment is handed down by a court the text of the decision is usually published very quickly on the court webpage. Soon afterwards, decisions from Australian courts are also published in a variety of legal databases, including AustLII, Lexis Advance and Thomson's Westlaw AU.

These decisions are referred to as unreported judgments because they have not been published in a law report series. An unreported judgment may subsequently be reported in one or more law report series. Although there is debate about the precedent value of unreported decisions, in practice and in academia they are heavily used as they may contain the only statement of the law on a particular subject.

Medium Neutral Citation

The unreported judgment below is an example of a medium neutral citation.

This method of citing unreported judgments was devised in the late 1990s by the High Court of Australia, in order to accommodate the citation of judgments when they were first made available online. As they don't have page numbers, pinpoint references are managed by sequentially numbering all paragraphs in the online judgment. All unreported judgments from the late 1990s are available online.

Example of a medium neutral unreported judgment citation:
Jones v Commonwealth of Australia [2023] HCA 34 at [4]