Free access to electronic databases containing English case law:

With CanLII (the Canadian Legal Information Institute) providing ever increasing free electronic access to Canadian case law, reliance on subscriptions services like Quicklaw and Westlaw is becoming less necessary. But what free access is available to English cases?

 

This article briefly describes how one may access and search free electronic databases of English case law on the internet.

 

This article begins by briefly describing two websites that provide access to English judgments, and then describes what coverage each of them provides for the various English courts including the following:

o       House of Lords

o       Privy Council

o       Court of Appeal

o       High Court (includes King and Queen’s Bench)

 

The most obvious choice for obtaining English case law is the BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) website. Like CanLII, BAILII is a member of the Free Access to Law Movement, a collaborative effort between key free access to law projects around the world. The umbrella Web site of the Free Access to Law Movement is WorldLII (www.worldlii.org).

 

To see a full list of the LIIs, as well as other Canadian case law databases, see the Legaltree Case law page: http://www.legaltree.ca/node/85

 

BAILII provides free access to databases containing decisions from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland and Europe. The best way to search the BAILII site is to use the advanced search page that allows you to search multiple databases at once: http://www.bailii.org/form/search_advanced.html.

 

Using the advanced search tool you can do a full text search of all the BAILII databases at once, or you can select particular checkboxes to narrow your search.

 

Apart from obtaining electronic copies of known English cases, BAILII can also be used to search for cases on a particular point. Boolean searches can be entered in the search field, and the Boolean connectors are described on the advanced search page.

 

This article focuses on English decisions. To review the scope of coverage of the other collections on BAILII (e.g. Irish, European), review their databases page: http://www.bailii.org/databases.html

 

A paid subscription is required to access HeinOnline and so it should not really feature in this article about free access to English case law. However, the public can access HeinOnline for free at the Vancouver branch of the British Columbia Courthouse Library, and access will soon be available at other Courthouse Libraries in British Columbia. Also, many law firms have access to HeinOnline which charges a flat fee annual subscription, instead of charging by the minute like some other services do. Therefore, HeinOnline is worth discussing.

  

 

HeinOnline recently added the English Reports reprint, 1220-1865, to their collection. This reprint consisted of 178 volumes containing over 100 000 cases. The reprint contains all published cases of all English courts prior to commencement of the Law Reports in 1865. The original compilation and publication of this collection took over 30 years to complete (1900-32) and was, at that time, the biggest publishing project ever undertaken.

 

 

One can locate particular cases in the English Reports database on HeinOnline in the following ways:

With the option of full text searches, HeinOnline can be used for more than just obtaining copies of known cases; one can use it to search for cases on a particular point.

  

 

However, having located a case on HeignOnline, one cannot obtain a “working” electronic copy of the case. HeinOnline output is in pdf form with only one page displayed at a time. You can click on the “view text” link at the top of the screen to obtain a page of raw, unformatted text. This allows you to “Ctrl F” to find key terms, but this can only be done on a page by page basis. The “view text” feature also allows you to copy and paste quotes (to save typing them out) but care should be taken to ensure that the quotes match the original text because the text is raw scanned text which as not been proofread, so scanning errors e.g. 1 instead of l are common. These problems make the HeinOnline output somewhat less useful than that available from services such as CanLII.