UoRM Law: Case law

Law reports contain details of rulings of national and international courts, generally including a full transcript of the judgment. For the UK, reports fall into one of two types:

• general series such as the All England Law Reports and the Weekly Law Reports
• specialist subject series such as Criminal Appeal Reports and Family Law Reports

It is recommended to search the JustCite database by the name or citation for a UK case to get details of the available reports for the case, with direct full-text links through to reports on our subscription databases and free Web content.

LexisLibrary and Westlaw UK also contain extensive full-text case law collections from EU and US courts, with lesser coverage of English-speaking Commonwealth jurisdictions, such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Many unreported UK judgments are also available on these two databases from the 1970s onwards. Transcripts of judgments by the official Court of Appeal and High Court shorthand writers are available on Casetrack.

Many decisions of international and national courts, both published and unreported, are now released free on the Web, including:

The British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) provides free access to databases of collected UK court and tribunal judgments and the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union and European Court of Human Rights. The Commonwealth Legal Information Institute provides similar access to Malaysian judgments.