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Case Law: Case citators

This Guides provides information relating to how to look for specific Cases, using different methods. It also includes links to various databases, to enable you locate Australian Case Law and Cases from other Jurisdictions.

Why use case citators?

Case citators will help you determine:​

  1. The correct citation for a case when you don't have the full citation
  2. If the case has been reported in more than one series of reports
  3. Whether the case has been reported in an authorised law report series
  4. Whether any later cases have considered the case
  5. Which earlier cases were considered by the case
  6. If journal articles have considered the case
  7. If the case has considered legislation.

Case citators will offer links to the full text of the judgment if it is available from the publisher of the citator. They also provide case treatment annotations. Annotations help you understand more about the history of a case and whether it is still considered good law. Definitions of these annotations are available here (compliments of University of Queensland Law Library).

 

Important case citators

CaseBase (Lexis Advance)
Australian reported and unreported judgments 1825+ and some international cases. CaseBase Journal Articles offers references to consideration of cases in journal articles. To link to leading UK cases cited in CaseBase go to Thomson Reuters Westlaw (International Materials > Cases > United Kingdom) and Lexis Advance for the All England Law Reports. The Publisher made below, provided an overview of the CaseBase Case Citator. 

 

KeyCite (Westlaw AU) 
KeyCite is Westlaw's built in citator. You can use it to view case particulars such as party names, judges, date etc. You can also use it to ascertain treatment of judgments, to see if a case still represents good law! It can also be used to see what legislation has been considered by a case. You may also gain access to other citing references, such as cases and secondary sources that discuss a case. It can provide links to the full text unreported judgements, as well as authorised and unauthorised law reports. This Westlaw AU Guide, provides an overview on KeyCite. You can also watch this video for more information. [Please note, when you click the icon, you will be directed to Westlaw AU's Training and Support webpage. To watch the video, click the white play button]. 

LawCite (AustLII) 
Australian and international cases. LawCite is an automatically generated international legal case and journal article citator. It is being developed at AustLII in collaboration with other members of the Free Access to Law Movement

 

Useful Fact: Case citators don’t search across the full text of a case. They search the data in the citator record or summary of the case, including citation, party names, jurisdiction, court and judge. 

Banner images: Image 1 retrieved from Pixabay. Image 2 by UWA Library. Image 3 retrieved from SBS. Image 4 retrieved from SL Blogs. Image 5 retrieved from Wikimedia.

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