• Westlaw is a vast but easily searchable online database of case law, legislation, legal journals, commentary and EU and international materials.
• Many of these documents are full text.
• This makes it an extremely valuable resource which will be essential to your study here.

• Go to www.swan.ac.uk
• Click on Current Students to go to MyUni page.
• Log in using your Swansea Login and click on iFind.
• In the iFind Discover box, type in Westlaw and click on Find.
• This will take you to the record. Click on access this resource and then on Swansea University.

• Click on Cases at the top of the page
• Search for the case using Free Text, Party
Names or Citation.
• To search using Free Text, type in the search term(s) in Free Text box. This searches through entire document for the search term.
• When searching for a phrase enclose it in quotations marks, such as “air pollution”.

• If there are too many hits, you can limit it to a particular topic or date by clicking on the left hand side of the page.

• Parties means the two sides involved in a case.
• Parties can be individuals, companies, local government or organisations.
• The names of the parties are separated by “v”.
• If one of the parties is the government, it is written as “R”. (R stands for for Regina or Rex).
• For example R v Nicholas Adam Lund.

• Basic rule when searching is Keep it Simple don’t put in anymore information than you need to.
• Type in one or both names into the Party
Names search box.
• Word of warning – Westlaw will not automatically correct misspellings.
• If a word is misspelt it will not find the record.

• Type in Bocardo SA v Star Energy UK Onshore Ltd.
• “Where Reported” field is the law series or journal the case has been reported in.
• “Documents” means the documents which
Westlaw has access to.
• “Official transcript” is the original document which was produced by the court.
• You can click on the titles blue to take you to a full text version of that case.

• All cases have a case analysis which is a summary of the case, and give you cases or legislation citing this case or other cases where this case is cited.

• means good (positive) or neutral treatment. The ruling was up held in any subsequent cases. It is a good law.
Green means go.
•
• means that it has been given negative treatment and that at least one section of the law has been subsequently overruled. Red means a bad law - don’t use it. means that there is an appeal for this case going through the Court of Appeal, Civil Division or the Supreme
Court means

• Click on Journals at the top of the page.
• Type in search terms in Free Text, Article Title or Author field.
• When searching for a phrase in the Free Text field, remember to use quotation marks.
• Try searching for an article called

• Legislation includes Acts of Parliament and
Statutory Instruments.
• If you know the title of the Act you can enter the title in the Act/SI title field.
• Try typing in Carriage of Goods by Sea Act
1971 and search.
• Clicking on Arrangement of Act will bring up the different sections which you can then click on.

• The sections which are still in force will have a green tick next to them.
• To get a pdf version, click on the icon at the right hand side of the page.

• Cases, journal articles and legislation can be printed, downloaded or e-mailed by opening the document and clicking on the envelope icon at the top of the page.
• To print a section or sections of the document click on the box next to the section you want to print, download or e-mail before clicking on the envelope icon.