A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, October 1999.

House of Lords judgments

The texts of all House of Lords judgments delivered since 14 November 1996 are on the House of Lords pages on the Parliament site. New judgments appear online within two hours of delivery at the House.

Judgments are listed in alphabetical order. Presentation is unremarkable, with no external links. 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.

To search the texts, use the Parliament search facility’s drop down list and select Opinions of the Lords of Appeal.

The Court Service

Selected judgments of the Court of Appeal and other divisions of the High Court started appearing on the Court Service site in Spring 1997. This presents a ‘map’ of the court structure and provides links to judgments, practice directions and daily lists for each of the courts, including the lower courts. There are links to the sites of specialists tribunals where selected decisions are also published: the Office of the Social Security and Child Support Commissioners, the Immigration Appellate Authority, the Special Commissioners of Income Tax and VAT and Duties Tribunals.

The number of judgments appearing on the Court Service site has increased greatly, though coverage is somewhat uneven as between the different courts. For many of the courts the judgments have been transferred to a searchable Domino database. Available judgments can be listed by case reference, by date or by the name of plaintiff, defendant or judge. You can also search the database using natural language terms, listing the results by relevance or in date order. Unfortunately the titles of many pages are not sufficiently specific, so the resulting listing is unhelpful. Most judgments are also avialable for download as zipped Word documents.

Other law reports

General series of online law reports include:

• Casebase from Smith Bernal is a free Court of Appeal transcript archive containing over 20,000 judgments from the Court of Appeal and Crown Office. No registration is required. The free service is currently limited to judgments up to the previous calendar year. Additional services are available through the chargeable Casetrack subscription service.
• Butterworths’ chargeable All England Direct service is the online version of the All England Law Reports.
• 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.
• The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting’s Daily Law Notes is a free service, providing precise and accurate summaries of those cases which will be included in The Weekly Law Reports – including decisions of the House of Lords, Privy Council, Court of Appeal and all divisions of the High Court.
• Free access to current law reports is available from both The Times and the Law Society’s Gazette, but in neither case is an archive available.
• Swarbrick & Co provide an index of over 9,000 case reports from January 1992 to date which can be searched by area of law as well as by date and by court.

Specialist reports on the web include:

• Masons’ Case Reports 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 is 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.
• Gray’s Inn Chambers provides a Tax Case Reporting Service – the intention is to put reports of significant tax cases online within 30 minutes.
• Jordans’ Family Law site provides summaries of recent family law decisions.
• The Employment Appeal Tribunal provides its judgments in full text.

Links

Links to websites referred to in this article are at www.infolaw.co.uk/ifl/law.htm#Cases [now removed]