A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, September 1997.

House of Lords judgments

One of the principal links from the House of Lords home page on the Parliament site is Judicial Business. From this page you can find information on the judicial work of the House of Lords describing the jurisdiction of the House, the Law Lords, procedure, and the history of the House’s judicial role. More usefully you will find the texts of judgments delivered since 14 November 1996 which appear online within 2 hours of delivery at the House.

Judgments are listed in alphabetical order. Presentation is unremarkable, with no links out. Texts are served up in 20 to 30K chunks, which reduces the initial download time but is frustrating if you want to scroll or search beyond the boundaries of the page.

Curiously, there is no Judgments category in the Parliament search facility’s drop down list and Opinions doesn’t do the trick it appears they are treated as Other’.

High Court judgments

Selected judgments of the Court of Appeal, other divisions of the High Court and the lower courts started appearing on the at Lord Chancellor’s Department server in the Spring. The LCD site itself is in a somewhat rudimentary form and a much more attractive front end to these judgments is provided from the Court Service’s home page, which presents a map’ of the court structure and provides for links to judgments, practice directions and daily lists for each of the courts.

At 2 September only the High Court links were active, leading to the following judgments:

• Chancery Division: The first legal ruling on internet domain names in the UK: Pitman Training v Nominet.
• Queen’s Bench Division: The McLibel’ marathon trial judgment summary: McDonalds v Steel & Morris in summary only: this judgement ran to several hundred pages.
• Court of Appeal, Civil Division: A restatement of much of the law concerning County Court Rules Order 17 Rule 11: Bannister v SGB plc; and Greig Middleton & Co v Napthali Denderowicz; Taiwo Olaleye-Oruene v London Guildhall University

Court of Appeal judgments are transcribed for the Lord Chancellor’s Department by Smith Bernal who developed the Livenote transcription system which is also used for private contracts. It has been announced that they will be launching a free access service to the texts of these judgments on their site. Presumably the Court Service site will link to these pages. Context will also be offering these same transcripts as a paid-for (non-web) Justis Daily Judgments service, complete with their search capabilities and linking.

Other law reports

Other than the official sites mentioned above, there are a number of sources of law reports both general and specialist:

• The legal information services from Lawtel, New Law Online and Sweet & Maxwell’s Current Legal Information provide wide ranging case summaries on a chargeable basis. Full transcripts can also be ordered and delivered by mail, fax or email.
• Other publishers, such as FT Law & Tax and Butterworths offer case summaries as part of their current awareness services.
• The Times Law Reports are offered on The Times site. (Registration is required.)

Other specialist sites write and compile sets of reports in their areas of specialism. These include:

• Masons Case Reports, which collects leading cases relating to the computer and telecommunications industries in a readily accessible form and provides authoritative commentary on each.
• The Estates Gazette Property Law Service, a chargeable subscription service which includes Next Day reporting direct from the courts on cases of interest to the property industry, as well as the Estates Gazette Law Reports, Planning Law Reports and Lands Tribunal Decisions.
• at Gray’s Inn ChambersTax Case Reporting Service, whose intention is to put reports of significant tax cases online within 30 minutes.
• Jordan’s Family Law site, which provides summaries of recent family law decisions.