Criminology

If you know the title of your Act use the resources below to find a current full-text copy.

Legislation history can be located using the Historical Notes or Endnotes found on the last pages of an Act, or through the historical versions links in online versions of acts.  Use the legislation databases above.

Statutes Annotations are research tools which enable you to trace the history of an Act, including:

• its Bill form;
• the date/s of the Second Reading speeches;
• when the Act was passed and when it commenced;
• how the Act has been amended since it was originally passed;
• whether an Act has been repealed; and 
• other technical information concerning the legislation.
• description and cases for any amended sections of the act.

Point-in-time research is performed to see how a section of an act looked at a particular time in the past.  Legal professionals use point-in-time research methods to determine how the law looked at the time an event or transaction occurred, eg. in contract law, work health and safety law,etc. 

You can use the Historical Notes at the end of an Act to uncover how a provision has been amended over time, and which acts made those changes.

Point-in-time research is quite methodical.  Follow these steps, which may need repeating, until you have the answers you need:

1. Locate the consolidated act on the relevant legislation website
2. Go to the Amendment History under the End Notes at the end of the last schedule.
3. Look through the list for the provision you are researching - these are listed sequentially.  Here you will see how a section was amended over time eg. ad (added or inserted), am (amended), rep (repealed), rs (repealed and substituted) etc.  Make a note of the relevant act numbers and years. 
4. Go to the Legislation History (also in the End Notes) and you will see the names of the acts you noted in the previous step and check the date they commence to see if they're relevant to the timeframe you are researching.
5. Go to the Principal Act and look for the compilation (online) or reprint (hardcopy) with the date you are after.

Tip: If the section you are looking for has not been amended over time it will not be listed in the History of Amendments.

LawOne (Timebase) legislation database has a range of point-in-time services including: Income tax, Corporations law, Banking and Finance, Criminal Service, Competition and Consumer Service, Customs Act, Employment, Energy and Resources, Excise Act, GST, Intellectual Property, Migration, Student Assistance Act 1973, Social Security Service.

To access these use

• LawOne > click on Timebase at the top of the page > see the list under Point-in-Time Services
• Multisearch > Databases tab > type Timebase > choose the service you want.

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

Jade provides access to Australian cases and tribunal decisions.  

Jade allows you to search by date, keywords, topic, legislation section or court and provides functionality for sharing results, creating alerts and saving searches.  All decisions are available in full-text and each one also has a citator report at the end of the decision. The range of information provided includes:

• Cases citing the decision
• Cases cited by the decision
• Legislation considered by the decision

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

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, or you can choose a practice area from the left side menu.

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.