Case Law and Courts

Ruth BirdLibrarianBodleian Law Library

Case law - body of law made up of court judgments

Why case law is important Doctrine of Precedent

Earlier judgments are important in deciding later cases

In general the decisions of higher courts bind lower courts

Cases interpret the law

The Court Hierarchy

Law Reporting The most important cases are

published in Law Reports

Law Reports are available in print and online

Less important cases are not reported and are referred to as unreported.

However, recently many unreported cases have been published online

Finding Law Reports in Print To find a law report in print you need to

know the citation e.g Pepper v Hart [1993] AC 513

You will find this report in the 1993 volume of the Appeal Cases starting at page 513

The year of publication is also the volume number. You need this information to choose the correct volume

This tells you which series of law reports to use. AC stands for Appeal Cases. Other abbreviations include:Ch – ChanceryFam – FamilyQB – Queens bench

This is the page number on which the report starts

Finding cases onlineBailli – http://www.bailii.org Free web siteIncludes: UK cases 1996 – Key historic judgments – the

most important judgments from British History

Cases from the European Court of Justice 1954-

Cases from the European Court of Human Rights 1960-

Quick search box – searches the full text of all the materials on Bailii. Can be useful but returns lots of hits!

Cases listed by party names (useful if you’re not sure of the exact spelling)

Case law search - more flexible search options for finding cases by party name, citation and subject

Subject lists of key cases

Links to legal materials from around the World

To search for a case by party names use the case name search box e.g. Searching for Reynolds v Times Newspaper

Choose the correct result from the results screen.Some cases are heard by several courts e.g. This case was heard first by the Employment Appeal Tribunal. It then went on appeal to the Court of Appeal. Finally it went on appeal to the House of Lords.In this example I have chosen the House of Lords case.

Court

Date of the judgment

Judges

Parties

The judgment

Options for searching by subject

You can use the tick boxes to restrict your search to a particular court e.g. The European Court of Justice

Lists of cases organised by subject