Online resources

Some series of law reports are now available online as subscription services, and many colleges and universities subscribe to services such as Lexis-Nexis, Westlaw and Justis either as an intranet service (available on your college’s or university’s networked computers) or via password-protected portals, allowing students to have access from any Internet connection.

The fundamental advantage of these electronic databases is that they are searchable by citation, by party names and by keywords, which makes the process of locating a case a great deal quicker than finding the right pages in volumes of law reports. Furthermore, some online databases provide additional features such as case summaries and annotations indicating whether a particular case has been applied, approved, overruled or doubted in later cases; and some even allow educational users to download cases.

The number of free online resources has increased significantly over recent years. The judgments of the Supreme Court are available at: www.supremecourt.gov.uk/decided-cases/index.html. The archived judgments of the House of Lords are available (at www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld/ldjudgmt.htm), where they are grouped in years, and within each year they are organised alphabetically. (Incidentally, on the same site you will also find the official report of proceedings in Parliament, known as Hansard.) Most of the decisions of the Court of Appeal and an increasing number of High Court judgments as well as decisions of the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights are available on the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) website (www.bailii.org).

Generally speaking, however, the weakness of the databases with free access lies in their search facilities. For example, the House of Lords archive site has only limited search facilities (available through the advanced search on the Parliament site: www.parliament.uk), although BAILII is somewhat more sophisticated. As far as the European sites are concerned, the entire case law of the European Court of Justice and the General Court, including its predecessor, the Court of First Instance (available at curia.eu.int/en/content/juris/ index.htm) is searchable online as are the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (available at www.echr.coe.int/echr).