Law

LawCite is a citator provided by Austlii, a collaboration project from the Free Access to Law Movement. It is an automatically generated international legal case and journal article citator and as such search results are gathered from Austlii's collection and the wider collections available through Worldlii.  Information provided by LawCite includes:

• Cases referred to by the case
• Cases citing the case
• Legislation considered by the case
• Articles that cite the case

LawOne allows you to quickly locate cases based on judicial consideration of legislation.  In other words, use LawOne when you want to locate cases that discuss a known section of legislation.  LawOne is also great when:

• you need to find legislation on a subject area
• you are looking for extrinsic material such as bills, second reading speeches, governing departments and historical information

Searches across all material in the Westlaw database to provide you an index of cases and provides material related to that case.  The range of information provided includes:

• Digest (including hyperlinked subject headings)
• Litigation history
• Cases cited
• Legislation judicially considered
• Noted in journals
• Party names

Lexis Advance has a feature called CaseBase that searches across all material held in the Lexis Advance database.  You can search CaseBase for:

• Cases referring to this case
• Journal articles referring to this case
• Cases considered by this case
• Legislation considered by this case
• Catchwords & Digest

iKnowConnect, published by CCH, allows you to access cases published in specialist reports.  These are subject related and collated under topic libraries.  Some (but not all) of the subject areas available include:

• Corporate governance, company and securities laws
• Taxation, bankruptcy and insolvency laws
• Employment, discrimination, family law, personal injury, medical and sports law

The general search field at the top of the homepage allows you to search broadly after you have ticked the relevant libraries you wish to search. Then you narrow your results using the drop-down menu under Search/Browse.

Databases that allow easy party name searching include Westlaw Australia, Lexis Advance (for CaseBase), CCH Intelliconnect, Jade, and LawCite.  Use the links below to access these databases.

Party names aren't necessarily surnames, here are some other examples of party names:

Ex parte - meaning with only one side present

R - meaning Regina or Rex (depending on the reigning monarch) and is used in its abbreviated form in case reports to indicate the Crown in criminal prosecutions

In re - usually indicates that there is only one party

Having trouble?

Often, the only information you have about a case is one or both of the party names. There are a few tips when searching by party name:

• Omit articles such as 'a', 'the' in names as well as terms such as 'Pty Ltd' in a company name
• Beware of abbreviations - sometimes the case will be listed under the abbreviation, other times you will need to search for the full name
• Beware of names with difficult or unusual spelling - always double-check spelling
• Generally you should omit the 'v' if searching for a full case name - check the database help section to find out the correct way to enter the names
• Party names are not unique, so it is important to verify that the case is the correct one by checking other details such as date, judge, court, topic etc.

When you do not know the citation of a case but know the case by its popular name, for example, the Tasmanian Dams case, you can obtain the citation details from the databases like Jade, LawCite, Lexis Advance or Westlaw Australia, or try the Australian Law Dictionary.

In the search box type your case name to find more details of the case, including its official citation.

Often you are trying to find cases in a subject area, rather than a specific case. Using the free-text search box in a database such as Lexis Advance, Westlaw Australia, LawOne, CCH, or Jade provides great results, some of which will also indicate additional materials like commentary about the case, links to articles, dictionary and encyclopaedia entries (in the case of Westlaw Australia and Lexis Advance).

Legislation judicially considered means that a piece of legislation, or part thereof, has been considered in case law - ie. by the judiciary.

Most legal research databases have a function for searching for legislation judicially considered.  In this place you can type the Statute or Regulation name along with the section, part or rule number.

Take a look in the databases below for quick and simple ways to search for legislation judicially considered.