Case Law and Courts
Ruth Bird
Librarian
Bodleian Law Library
Case law - body of law made up of court
judgments
Why case law is important
 Doctrine of Precedent
 Earlier judgments are important in
deciding later cases
 In general the decisions of higher courts
bind lower courts
 Cases interpret the law
The Court Hierarchy
Law Reporting
 The most important cases are
published in Law Reports
 Law Reports are available in print
and online
 Less important cases are not
reported and are referred to as
unreported.
 However, recently many
unreported cases have been
published online
Finding Law Reports in Print
 To find a law report in print you need to
know the citation
 e.g Pepper v Hart [1993] AC 513
The year of publication
is also the volume
number. You need this
information to choose
the correct volume
This tells you which series of
law reports to use. AC stands
for Appeal Cases. Other
abbreviations include:
Ch – Chancery
Fam – Family
QB – Queens bench
 You will find this report in the 1993
This is
the page
number
on which
the report
starts
volume of the Appeal Cases starting at
page 513
Finding cases online
Bailli – http://www.bailii.org
 Free web site
Includes:
 UK cases 1996 –
 Key historic judgments – the
most important judgments
from British History
 Cases from the European Court
of Justice 1954 Cases from the European Court
of Human Rights 1960-
Quick search box –
searches the full text of
all the materials on
Bailii. Can be useful but
returns lots of hits!
Cases listed by party names
(useful if you’re not sure of the
exact spelling)
Subject lists of key cases
Case law search more flexible search
options for finding
cases by party name,
citation and subject
Links to legal materials
from around the World
To search for a case by party names use the case name
search box
e.g. Searching for Reynolds v Times Newspaper
Choose the correct result from the results screen.
Some cases are heard by several courts
e.g. This case was heard first by the Employment Appeal Tribunal.
It then went on appeal to the Court of Appeal.
Finally it went on appeal to the House of Lords.
In this example I have chosen the House of Lords case.
Court
Judges
Parties
Date of the judgment
The judgment
Options for
searching
by subject
You can use the tick boxes to
restrict your search to a particular
court
e.g. The European Court of Justice
Lists of cases organised
by subject