Access to case law in a healthy common law
community
Author:
BCom, LLB (NSW), LLM (Syd), A Dip Art (ANU), Managing director, Elkera Pty Limited
Date: 05 August 2000
This is a paper presented by Peter
Meyer at the Australian Law Librarians' Symposium in Sydney in July
2000.
Access to case law in Australia has been
improved greatly with the use of electronic publishing technologies and the
World Wide Web. However, there is more to be done to filter published judgments
to reflect their relevance to legal researchers and the courts.
Only a small number of judgments are actually relevant as legal
precedents. The vast majority are of interest to the parties and no one else.
Most Australian jurisdictions have long had arrangements for the production of
official or authorized law reports covering judgments that decide or articulate
important points of law. In some jurisdictions, statutory law reporting bodies
have been formed while in others the task has been handed to commercial
publishers.
To provide improved access to case law,
the principles used for traditional law reporting should be applied to online
databases of court judgments.
Access to case law in a healthy common law
community
Confusion, cost and competition
In Australia the evolving mechanisms for access
to case law could be seen as one step forward, two steps back. Electronic
publishing technology has opened up many new opportunities and tools for legal
research but a fragmented approach to case law management may seriously degrade
the efficiency of the legal system. Problems include: • confusion about the proper source of case law, including the role
of traditional law reports; • high costs caused by poor data management and restricted access to
authoritative sources of case law held by commercial publishers;
and • a lack of competitive
and comprehensive online access to Australian case law.
It is submitted that the solution to these problems is to
think of access to case law as a knowledge management process. This process
should begin with the courts and extend to all groups involved in case law
publication and dissemination. Our common law legal system is built on
precedent derived from decided cases. A successful knowledge management process
will enhance this system for the benefit of the Australian community. It will
also provide clear benefits to all current and future generations of legal
researchers and practitioners.
There are a number
of initiatives underway in Australian courts and other agencies that are
working in this direction. This paper aims to build on those
initiatives.
Background
Before the advent of
electronic publishing technology, the framework under which lawyers and other
legal researchers gained access to case law was stable. The sources of case law
were confined to printed law reports series published by public bodies such as
Council’s of law reporting and commercial publishers. There was some access to
unreported judgments from the courts but this was limited and problematic. The
management of copies of judgments was often poor or
non-existent.
The development of electronic
publishing technologies over the past decade or more opened up new ways in
which we may gain access to case law. This is accelerated by the growth of the
internet and the increasing dominance of internet related technologies in
information retrieval. Now we have access to case law and other legal materials
on multiple on line sites, on CD-ROM as well as via the traditional hard copy
sources.
Anyone who has tried to research case law
on sites such as AustLII or
SCALE
Plus will know that searches of electronic materials can return a
large number of hits. Sorting the relevant from the irrelevant in these results
can be extremely time consuming for the researcher. Each successive researcher
investigating the same problem will have to undertake the same research. This
is not efficient and it is not knowledge management.
Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of the problem. Most
online sites provide access only to recent decisions that have been delivered
since judgments have been prepared using personal computers. Authorised reports
series such as the CLR or the NSWLR may be available only from a single
commercial publisher’s online site, if they are available at all. There is no
single electronic repository of all the case law a researcher may require. A
researcher cannot undertake comprehensive research of case law
online.
Competition in Australian legal publishing
has produced a large number of printed reports series that provide access to
the same materials. At the federal level we have the CLR, ALJR, ALR, FCR, Fam
LR, FLC & FLR plus specialist reports for companies, tax, trade practices
and other areas. At the state level we have the NSWLR, VR, Qd.R, SASR, WAR, Tas
R, NTLR and specialist series for criminal law and planning law.
There are also an increasing number of online sources for case
law. Many series are published by commercial publishers and an increasing
number by the courts or by public access portals. None of these provides
comprehensive access to Australian case law or likely to do so in the
foreseeable future.
Questions
raised by this include: • How does a
researcher find those cases that are important for their inquiry among all the
cases now available online? • Which version of a case can a researcher use in
court? • Are versions from
different sources equivalent? • Why should someone have to use or purchase access to multiple
sources of online case law to be sure of getting comprehensive
coverage?
The “law” in case law
It is useful to recall some fundamental
principles of our common law system that should be known by any first year law
student.
The common law system is based on the
legal principle of deciding points in litigation according to precedent. This
applies both to application of the common law and interpretation of statute.
Under this principle, decisions of courts on matters of law are binding on
subordinate courts or tribunals and, if not binding, are highly persuasive on
the court itself or equivalent courts
[Lord Bingham,
2000].
A companion
principle to the doctrine of precedent is that it is only the
ratio decidendi (ratio) that is binding on
other courts or tribunals. The ratio is the principle upon which a case is
decided. Other comments made by the judge that may not be strictly necessary
for the decision at hand are obiter dicta and do not have precedent value,
although they may be useful in argument in later cases. While simple to state,
application of this distinction can be difficult in practice. This can be seen
in the selection criteria for reported decisions discussed
later.
The vast majority of decisions of courts and
tribunals involve the identification of the facts and issues in dispute and the
application of settled law. In these cases, it is not necessary to decide a
point of law because the law is well known, usually through earlier decided
cases [Lord Bingham,
2000]. This majority of decided cases play no role in
the system of precedent. This is not to say that the public should not have
access to these decisions or that researchers may not wish to use
them.
It follows that if we are looking for case
law in our common law system, we have to look in those cases that actually
decide a point of law as part of the decision necessary to resolve the dispute
between the parties. As will be shown during the discussion of the criteria for
selection of reportable cases, it is necessary to look beyond those cases that
actually make new law. For example, it can involve explaining the law or
confirming that an old decision is still good law.
Core objectives of our knowledge management framework should be to
facilitate fast, accurate and economical access to decisions with precedent
value. This means that cases with precedent value should be clearly
distinguished in case law retrieval systems from those that do not.
Fortunately, there is a well established process to assist.
Law reporting
Brief history
Formal law reporting has
a long tradition derived from the United Kingdom. The Incorporated Council of
Law Reporting for England and Wales was incorporated in 1863 and is responsible
for the production of the Weekly Law Reports and the Authorised
Reports.
In Australia, all states (South Australia
excepted) and the Northern Territory have a Council of Law Reporting that
undertakes or administers the law reporting process in that jurisdiction. Most
Councils are statutory bodies incorporated under specific legislation
[Law reporting
legislation]. However, the WA body is not incorporated.
The Queensland and Northern Territory bodies are incorporated. There is no
federal Council of Law Reporting.
Authorised reports
The terms
“authorised” reports or “reported cases” are frequently used but may not be
fully understood.
In the UK and Australian systems,
authoritative versions of decisions with precedent value have traditionally
been found in the “authorised reports” for each jurisdiction. At the federal
level, the Commonwealth Law Reports (CLR) and the Federal Court Reports (FCR)
are the authorised reports for the High Court and the Federal Court
respectively, for example
[FCA Practice
Note 9, 1993].
At the state
level, the New South Wales Law Reports (NSWLR), the Victorian Reports (VR),
Queensland Reports (Qd.R), South Australian State Reports (SASR), Western
Australia Reports (WAR), Tasmanian Reports (Tas R) and the Northern Territory
Law Reports (NTLR) have the status of authorised reports in their
jurisdictions.
It is important to note that the
authorisation process may occur formally, as in the case of the FCR or
informally through long practice and usage, as in the case of the
NSWLR.
There is a two step process to the creation
of authorised reports. Firstly, a nominated body performs the selection and
reporting process. If these reports are then granted formal or informal
“authorisation” by court directions or practice, those reports become a
preferred or authoritative source of precedent law.
If a case is said to be “reported” it has this status because it
is included in one of the authorised report series mentioned
earlier.
Selection criteria for reported decisions
In the writer’s experience many
practitioners are only vaguely aware of the criteria used in the selection of
reported decisions. The current editor of the NSWLR, Naida Haxton, has written
about the selection criteria used in the NSWLR and generally in law reports
[Haxton
1998]: “The criteria for reportability are well
recognised[1] and applied. They include: (i) a case which introduces a new principle or new rule of
law; (ii) a case which
materially modifies an existing principle of law or settles a doubtful question
of law; (iii) a case which
applies an existing principle in a novel area; (iv) a case in which the language of legislation
is definitively interpreted; (v) a case in which clauses, phrases or words in common use in
documents (eg, wills, contracts, insurance policies, charter parties) are
construed; (vi) a case in
which the rules of practice of the court are interpreted and their application
extended, modified or applied to obscure or unsettled
points; (vii) all cases
which for any reason are peculiarly instructive. [1] Manual on Law Reporting. N J Haxton, 1991, Federation Press
Sydney at 11-12.” Naida
Haxton’s article provides a comprehensive overview for those interested in
gaining a better understanding of the reporting process.
The knowledge management process
Once a case is selected for reporting, a
considerable amount of work must be done to prepare the case for inclusion in
the reports. These steps include
[Haxton
1998]: • preparation of catchwords and headnotes; • identification of statutes and cases actually
considered in the decision and the preparation of case
lists • verification of the
accuracy of quotations and citations against the original source
material; • presentation in
a consistent style; and • obtaining approval of the judge to the editorial
work.
The overall editorial process
is important. From discussions with persons involved in law reporting, it is
clear that considerable work is often undertaken to verify quotations and
citations in judgments delivered by the courts. Often, corrections are required
to provide an accurate and consistent report. Extraction of the ratio and
writing of a succinct headnote requires skill and experience.
Once a headnote is prepared, it is available for all future legal
researchers as a mechanism to quickly determine the relevance of a decision to
their needs. It is not hard to see how a quality headnote can save a large
number of people substantial research time over many decades.
The reporting process provides a reliable source of precedent for
all future users. Law reports avoid the need to re-argue issues, they save
research effort, they promote consistency in the law.
It is inconceivable that this information extraction and quality
process will be performed on every judgment that is delivered by the courts. It
is only worth undertaking for those with precedent value to the legal system.
That is knowledge management.
Once this work is
completed by experienced persons in an accountable environment, it is easy to
see why the courts should prefer that only those decisions that have been
reported in this way should be cited in future proceedings. To do otherwise
exposes the courts to error and unnecessary effort.
Naturally, every decision in the law reports does not remain good
law forever. Some are overruled or disapproved in later cases so one must
always work through later decisions to determine the status of earlier
decisions.
Unreported decisions
The term unreported decisions may have at
least three connotations. Firstly, it can refer to decisions that may be
reportable but have not yet appeared in a reports series (reportable but
unreported). Secondly, it can refer to those decisions that are not considered
by the editors of the law reports to have sufficient precedent value to warrant
reporting (not reportable). Thirdly, it may sometimes be used to refer to a
source for the decision other than in the law reports (alternative sources).
These different uses can cause confusion, particularly as there are now many
different online sources for cases.
The
“reportable” category is the simplest to consider. Due to the work involved in
the reporting process, there will always be some lag between handing down a new
decision and its reporting. There is no barrier to citation of reportable
decisions if they are not yet reported. It is to be expected that most of the
unreported decisions that are cited in the law reports will fall in this
category.
Traditionally, the
courts have discouraged citation of cases that fall into the “not reportable”
category. However, unreported decisions in this category may be useful for some
purposes: • for comparison of quantum
awards in damages cases and sentences in criminal cases;
or • for argument, flavour
or guide to the approach taken by various courts.
Occasionally, the reportable status of a decision is not
recognised until later.
Many unreportable decisions
are included in specialty reports series such as Trade Practices, Company and
Property reports series offered by commercial publishers. A striking feature of
these services is that they do not provide any differentiation between reports
with precedent value (those that ought to appear in the law reports) and those
that do not. Consequently, researchers who start with one of these series may
have to work hard to identify the truly relevant cases.
Alternative sources for case law
The Australian legal publishing environment has produced a wide
range of online and hard copy sources for case reports. For example, at the
Federal level, there are the Australian Law Journal Reports (ALJR),
Commonwealth Law Reports (CLR), Australian Law Reports (ALR), Federal Court
Reports (FCR) as well as multiple specialist series for tax, companies, trade
practices, intellectual property and family law. Online versions are becoming
by far the most prolific with perhaps half a dozen possible sources for reports
of some courts. A case could easily be published by three or four commercial
publishers, AustLII,
SCALE
Plus and
LawLink.
Legal
publishers will wish to provide comprehensive access to case law, if possible.
If the publisher cannot provide access to an authorised report series, it is
natural to expect that the publisher will not be keen to promote the status of
that series. Instead, their alternative case series will be offered as
sufficient for their customer’s purposes.
There are
several online sources for High Court reports from 1947 but only LBC
Information Services can publish the CLR online. A similar situation occurs
with other authorised report series. Essentially, there is a lack of
convenient, competitive online access to authorised reports.
In the era before electronic publishing, this did not matter so
much. There was only a need for one publisher to produce the CLRs or the VRs
and it really did not matter to a researcher who printed the series. Electronic
access is different. There is a serious loss of benefits if the researcher has
to visit several sites to research a point or if it is necessary to resort to
manual processes for a substantial part of the process.
The limited availability of authorised series online, coupled with
widespread availability of alternate sources of online case law appears to be
creating confusion about the proper source of precedent. It is not uncommon to
hear it said that the distinction between reported and unreported decisions is
now irrelevant. In the writer’s experience, this is often heard from people
closely connected to online publishing operations. What can such statements
really mean? Surely, unreported decisions with no precedent value should not be
accorded the same status in a research system as those determined by
professional editors to have precedent value. Surely, a version of a decision
that lacks the quality process applied to a reported decision should not be
given the same status as one without.
It would be a
tragedy for our legal system if the prophecies of increasing irrelevance of
reported decisions is borne out. Researchers, practitioners and the courts will
all incur increased workloads redundantly sifting through a large number of
decisions to determine their relevance, accuracy and authority as legal
precedents. Law reporting is the knowledge management process to avoid this
problem.
Copyright, competition and the public interest
Copyright in reported judgments
When a judgment is reported, a
considerable amount of editorial work is performed on the judgment to produce a
new work based on a compilation of the judgment and the additional material,
including catchwords and headnote. There seems little doubt that this work is
subject of a separate copyright. Whether the judges, the court or the crown in
some other capacity owns copyright in original decisions is not material for
this discussion. As far as the writer can determine, copyright in reported
cases may be held by a body such as a Council of Law Reporting or a commercial
publisher under licence from the copyright holder of the original
judgment.
The writer understands
that copyright in the following authorised report series is held by commercial
publishers: • CLR, FCR, VR, SASR, Tas R and
ACTR
Copyright
in the following series is believed to be held by a Council of Law Reporting
body: • NSWLR, Qd.R, WAR and
NTLR
In a competitive publishing
environment, it is extremely unlikely that a rational publisher will licence
competitive firms to publish its copyright works such as authorised reports on
reasonable terms, or at all. Competing publishers are encouraged, even
compelled, to develop competing reports series and to discourage any
recognition of the authorised series which they do not publish. In an era of
online publishing this will inevitably lead to a weakening of the reporting
process.
It is also difficult to see the
justification for a court to require citation of cases from a commercial
“authorised” series, as happens with the Federal Court and High Court. Surely
the creation of private monopoly rights over a primary source for the law is
not in the public interest.
It is submitted that
the only solution to this is to ensure that an independent body who can deal
equitably and openly with all prospective publishers holds copyright in all
authorised reports.
Benefits of Councils of Law Reporting
Law reporting is a
knowledge management process that requires great skill. The process of
selection of decisions to report should be open to scrutiny so that errors can
be corrected. Independent Councils of Law Reporting can develop expertise,
provide accountability and facilitate competitive online access to authorised
reports. To do this, Councils of Law Reporting must hold copyright in the
authorised reports in their jurisdictions. Only as a copyright holder can they
act as an independent licensee of data to multiple publishers.
Councils of Law Reporting that do not hold copyright in their
reports series should be encouraged to acquire those rights, if commercially
possible. At the very least, they should not renew current arrangements under
which commercial publishers hold copyright. It should be quite practicable to
enter into arrangements under which the Council holds future copyright in a
similar way as is done for the NSWLR and Qd.R.
At
the federal level, there is no Council of Law Reporting. A federal Council of
Law Reporting should be established for the High Court and federal
jurisdictions to act as an independent copyright holder and to open the
reporting process to greater public accountability. If commercially feasible, a
new federal Council of Law Reporting should acquire copyright in the CLR and
the FCR.
Law reporting should not be conducted for
the benefit of commercial publishers. It is undertaken for the benefit of the
legal system and users of that system. It is hard to see how the production of
multiple reports series does anything other than increase costs, degrade
quality and muddy the waters about the proper source of case law. There is no
reason why authorised reports series cannot be available from multiple online
sites using appropriate electronic publishing methodologies. We can have
competitive access to case law but it is difficult to identify a function for
competitive versions of case law.
Councils of Law
Reporting are non-profit bodies. They can provide extremely cost effective
access to case law. For example, at the time of writing (August 2000), a
subscription to the NSWLR bound volumes (published by the Council of Law
Reporting) costs approximately $129 per volume of 750 pages. This is an average
cost of just over 17c per page. A subscription to the CLR (published by a
commercial publisher) cost (at May 2000) approximately $270 per volume of 600
pages. This is an average cost of approximately 45c per page, more than twice
the cost of the NSWLR. How is this in the public interest?
Management of electronic data by the courts
There is a clear need to provide convenient
online access to unreported judgments. At the very least these are needed to
provide access to new “reportable” decisions while the formal reporting process
is carried out. Others may be useful also, particularly in assessment of
damages and sentencing cases.
Increasingly, the
courts will provide online access to their own judgments as part of their
overall data and information management strategies. There is also a strong
demand for access to unreported judgments by commercial and free to air
publishers. Finally, law reporting bodies require access to judgments data for
the reporting process.
The courts should adopt
electronic data management strategies to facilitate fast, accurate and cost
effective access to data for new judgments to meet these needs.
Currently, all judgments provided by the courts are in word
processing formats. Each publisher must take this data and re-work it into a
suitable format for publication using the publisher’s chosen software. The
writer has had extensive experience working in a publishing environment with
this kind of material. The use of word processing formatted data as an input to
the publishing process imposes high costs on publishers. This is due to the
cost of translating unstructured data with ever changing proprietary formats
into a publishing format. Unless this work is undertaken, published versions
are likely to be of poor quality. It is easy to see many examples of formatting
and presentation problems with case and other data provided by online sites
such as AustLII and some commercial sources. We get what we pay
for.
Perhaps up to half a dozen publishers will
seek to publish the same judgment on their sites. Each of them must undertake
extensive data conversion work on the same data before they can introduce it to
their publishing systems. Publishing from this kind of source data imposes a
massive duplication of costs. Ultimately, these costs are borne by
consumers.
There is an alternative. Recently the
Federal Court announced a proposal to prepare all Federal Court judgments in a
non proprietary format designed for automated processing using either the
Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML)
[ISO
8879:1986] or Extensible Markup Language (XML)
[W3C
1998]. This is an extremely important development. Use
of a data format such as SGML or XML will greatly facilitate the efficiency of
the publishing process and archival management of case law. It has the
potential to offer significant cost savings to publishers and consumers and to
improve the quality of presentation and reliability of case law online. Under
this model, most of the hard work is done once by the courts. Publishers can
concentrate on adding value. This is an essential part of knowledge management
for this kind of information. There is no reason why publishers should not pay
for access to this kind of high quality data.
Courts should follow the lead announced by the Federal Court and
adopt an SGML or XML format for publication of all judgments released for
public access. This will reduce costs to publishers and facilitate accurate,
comprehensive and competitive access at reasonable cost.
Electronic data for authorised reports
Digitisation of many authorised reports series is incomplete or
the sole digital copy is held by a commercial publisher to the exclusion of the
copyright holder (a Council of Law Reporting). For example, many older series
such as the NSW Reports and the State Reports that precede the NSWLR in 1971
have not been captured in digital form. These reports remain relevant to the
common law in New South Wales and elsewhere. During the 1980s many reports
series were captured in electronic form by CLIRS under an exclusive licence
from various governments. Following the purchase of Info-One by Butterworths
they may hold the sole digital source for some authorised series such as the VR
and the Qd.R. Until recently this was true also of the NSWLR.
In the case of the VR, Butterworths is both the copyright holder
in the authorised reports compilation and the holder of the electronic
data.
Even if a Council of Law Reporting wished to
grant a licence to other publishers to publish an authorised reports series
online, they cannot do so without digitising the reports again. In some cases
this has strengthened the online monopoly over some reports
series.
Councils of Law Reporting who do not hold
copyright in the reports should be encouraged to acquire that copyright and to
digitise their reports. Councils who hold copyright should be encouraged to
digitise their reports to facilitate competitive licensing.
An example of competitive licensing
Early in 2000 the Council of Law Reporting for NSW announced that
it had completed development of an electronic database for the NSWLR using SGML
markup in accordance with Document Type Definitions (DTDs) it had developed.
The Council now offers to licence multiple publishers to publish the NSWLR
online as the NSWLR. It is expected that at least two publishers will acquire
non-exclusive NSWLR publishing licenses. This model will facilitate many of the
developments discussed in this paper.
Knowledge management by the courts
Precedent value categorisation
So far
the discussion has covered knowledge management by the law reporting bodies and
by the courts in the selection of appropriate data formats. There is much more
that the courts can do in this area.
The Australian
Institute of Judicial Administration (AIJA) recommends that courts apply a
classification to all judgments using the following categories
[AIJA
1999]: “[NOTE: A possible system of categorisation
is as under: • Category AThose of significance and/or recurrent interest by virtue of their
discussion/application of legal principle. • Category BThose
which are more routine in nature because they are either essentially decisions
on discrete fact situations or are fairly routine examples of the application
of well known and understood principles. Such judgments would not normally
warrant reporting or uploading into a national database. • Category CThose
which contain data indicating current levels of assessment of damages
…” It is
possible that Category C might be revised or another category added to include
sentencing cases in the criminal law area. In addition, Category A should be
refined to apply criteria closer to those used by law reporting bodies in the
selection of reported cases. However, in the first instance, the classification
by the court should include a wider class of cases to ensure that reporting
bodies evaluate all realistic candidates for reporting. Editors of law reports
should not have to consider cases in categories B and C.
These categorisations should be attached to judgments as
attributes or meta data for all time. In addition, once a judgment is reported
in an authorised series, this fact should be recorded with the original
judgment in the court’s database.
The terms of licence of judgments data to publishers
should reinforce this process. For example: • Publishers should include in any publication of judgments a
statement of its categorisation by the courts. If the court later changes its
categorisation, publishers should update their online
versions. • Publishers
should identify in their online unreported judgments databases those versions
that are superseded by a reported version.
Preservation of this information will assist researchers to
quickly distinguish between cases with precedent value and those that do not.
Researchers can then decide how to efficiently apply their research time. It
will promote consistency in use of reported decisions and provide maximum
benefits from the reporting process. If law reporting bodies offer publishing
licences for their reported judgments series on equitable terms, commercial
publishers can take no exception to the identification of reported cases in
unreported judgments databases. It should be done anyway as part of a
professional product.
Indexing and use of a thesaurus
Some courts now apply catchwords
to judgments before publication. The AIJA promotes the use of key titles and
sub titles provided by LBC Information Services
[AIJA
1999].
Catchwords can be
useful as a quick way to gain the sense of a judgment. However, in online
information systems there is a need for a consistent classification system to
augment text search tools that rely on literal word matching.
The AIJA recognises the limitations of these titles for indexing
judgments and suggests development of a thesaurus for indexing purposes. This
would be an important initiative. Such a thesaurus must not be commercially
owned. It is recommended that a public body such as a State Library be
encouraged to undertake this development and provide an equitable licensing
scheme to provide access to all publishers.
Conclusions
It is not too late to develop a coherent knowledge
management framework for Australian case law to deal with the issues discussed.
Some important initiatives are already underway and others not mentioned. A
body with an overarching responsibility and influence such as the AIJA could
pick up this issue. Such a body should: • encourage greater understanding of the nature of and use of
authorised law reports; • encourage the courts to maintain and even strengthen their
requirements for citation of authorised series in preference to unreported
versions; • promote the
adoption of publishing friendly data formats such as SGML or XML for judgments
published by the courts; • continue its promotion of categorisation of judgments at source
and the development of a thesaurus for indexing
judgments; • encourage
courts to require publishers to include the court’s judgment classifications in
all publications of their judgments; • promote the formation of a federal Council of Law Reporting and
state bodies in those states that do not have such a
body; • encourage all
Councils of Law Reporting to acquire copyright in the editorial work created
during the reporting process; • encourage all Councils of Law Reporting to develop digital
databases for their reports series; and • encourage all Councils of Law Reporting to
develop licensing procedures for licensing their reports series to publishers
for online publication along similar lines to that developed by the Council of
Law Reporting for NSW.
These
measures will greatly reinforce the role of precedent in the common law system
and provide for low cost, efficient and equitable access to case
law.
Acknowledgement
The author gratefully acknowledges assistance from Naida Haxton,
Editor of the New South Wales Law Reports who provided information for this
paper. However, the views expressed in this paper are not necessarily the views
of Naida Haxton or the Council of Law Reporting for NSW.
References
[AIJA 1999]
Australian Insitute of Judicial
Administration, 1999, Guide to Uniform Production of
Judgments (2nd edition), (AIJA), 1999, Annexure A, prepard by
Justice L T Olsson, published on-line at
http://www.aija.org.au/online/judguide.htm.
[Lord Bingham, 2000]
Lord Bingham, 2000. Keynote Speech
at Law Reporting, Legal Information and Electronic media in the New
Millennium, Cambridge University Law Faculty, 17 March
2000, published on-line at
http://www.lawreports.co.uk/17march.htm.
[FCA Practice Note 9, 1993]
For example, Federal Court of
Australia Practice Note No 9 (1993) 45 FCR 8 requires use of the report of
decision in the FCRs if it is reported in that series.
[ISO 8879:1986]
International Organization for
Standardization, 1986, Information processing – Text and office
systems – Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML),
available for purchase at
http://www.iso.org.
[Haxton 1998]
Haxton, NJ., 1998, Law
Reporting and Risk Management Citing Unreported Judgments (1998) 17
Aust Bar Rev 84.
[Williams, 2000]
Williams, R., 2000. Law Reporting, Legal
Information and Electronic media in the New Millennium, Cambridge
University Law Faculty, 17 March 2000, published on-line at
http://www.lawreports.co.uk/17march.htm.
[W3C 1998]
W3C, 1998,
Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0, 10 February
1998.
[Law reporting legislation]
See Council of Law Reporting Act 1969
(NSW), Council of Law Reporting in Victoria Act 1967 (Vic), and Council of Law
Reporting Act 1990 (Tas).
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