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
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.
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