Abbreviations are often used to refer to legal reports and legal journals. Use the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations to find out what abbreviations mean. The Cardiff Index contains abbreviations for UK and foreign legal reports and reviews, as well as some important legislative publications and manuals. Westlaw, Lexis and other databases also contain information on abbreviations. In the Social Sciences Reading Room, you will find online legal databases that you can use for case research. The databases provide access to case summaries, full-text legal reports, transcripts of judgments and commentaries. The databases include the following series of legal reports: The Official Law Reports, All Englands and some other series that use the year as a volume number often have more than one volume per year. The volume number follows the year following the square brackets. Annual volume figures rarely exceed 5.
Easily download PDFs of case reports from the Lexis®library for use in court. • U.S. federal and state laws and legal reports At the British Library you can access extensive collections of legal reports published in Britain from the 19th century onwards. We also have transcripts of judgments for some cases. Modern legal reports aim to provide accurate, full-text accounts of court decisions and reasoning in cases that have the force of law as precedents. They are dominated by cases from higher courts and very rarely contain cases decided by lower courts. Regardless of the volume in which they appear, the reports include the decisions of all the Supreme Courts of England and Wales, including all divisions of the High Court and Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (formerly the House of Lords), the Privy Council, the European Court of Justice and high-ranking courts such as the Upper Tribunal. Employment Appeal Tribunal and Competition Appeal Tribunal. Many judgments are recorded in more than one series of legislative reports, some of which are more authoritative than others.
For the most comprehensive and authoritative report, read the official legal reports. The All England Law Reports are often cited on reading lists; In general, the verdict should be the same in each report, especially for contemporary reports, although the note and other information contained by the lawyer who prepared the report is different. Legal reporting was regulated in the late nineteenth century. Prior to 1865, lawyers attended hearings and wrote and published case reports, often under their own names. These reports are commonly referred to as «appointment reports». The dissemination of these reports and uncertainty as to what constituted the authoritative report of the judgment led to the creation of the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting (ICLR), which publishes the official legal reports. Many older reports have been collected and published in 172 volumes under the name English Reports. We update the All England Law Reports weekly so you always have access to the latest judgments when advising clients. Six or seven sets of legal reports generally cover UK courts, while many series deal with specific areas of law. The Law Reports series provides authoritative full-text reports.
The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting has published this series since 1865. Previously, reports of varying quality were published in various «appointment» bill reports. • British laws, legal instruments and legal reports The British Library has had modern legal reports published in the UK since 1865. In our reading rooms you can search for legal cases and use online databases, print journals or news media. Practice: Citation of Authorities 2012 states that if a case is reported in official legal reports, «that report must be cited. It is the reports that are the most authoritative; They contain a summary of the argument. Other sets of official reports and minutes of judgements may only be used if a case is not included in the official legal reports. He goes on to say that if the judgment is not reported in the official legal reports, the All England Law Reports or the Weekly Law Reports should be cited. Volume 4 was launched in 2016 as an online-only extension of the Weekly Law Reports and expands coverage to include other cases of interest that illustrate the application of existing principles to specific issues or usefully merge and summarize established principles. These additional reports allow us to report on more factual cases involving aspects of family law, shipping, convictions and the award of general damages. These citations do not refer to a printed source, but they identify the case and can be used to search for case reports in online databases. A neutral quote does not guarantee that a case has been reported online or in print. We have reports and reviews that are incomplete or not available online.
The following selected titles can be requested in our reading rooms: Approximately 2500 judgments (less than 2% of all judgments) are reported each year in the legislative report series. The decisions of the Supreme Court (formerly the House of Lords) and the Court of Appeal prevail because of the weight given to them by case law. Only a small proportion of the thousands of cases brought before the High Court are reported. When Law Reports, the most reliable reports in England and Wales, were proposed in 1863, it was suggested that they should include all cases which: If you are quoting a report of a judgment, cite the «best report» (as indicated in the table of legal reports above) and indicate the year of the volume and the volume number, if applicable, The abbreviation for the Law Report series and the first page of the report. If there is no neutral quote (which will be the case before 2001), include the dish in parentheses at the end.
