PacLII - Help: Case Law

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Case Law Help

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The case law databases contain the decisions of judges in matters before a court or tribunal. Generally, judges' decisions go over the facts of the case, the relevant law in the circumstances, and then discuss how the law applies to the relevant facts. The judge may also refer to relevant legislation (laws or "Acts" passed by parliament), regulations or international treaties. Because of this, case law is often important in understanding how particular Acts of parliament operate and apply day to day.

The PacLII case law databases include hypertext links to most relevant material. These generally include the following:

references to other cases; and
references to Acts.

These links are inserted automatically by our hypertext markup software, which uses complex heuristics to determine exactly which documents a citation might refer to. In most cases the links are correct, however sometimes errors are made, due to the nature of English writing, and legal writing in particular. You should also bear in mind that links to Acts usually go to the current version of that Act, not necessarily the version of the Act that existed at the time that the judgement was written.

Using Cases

Each case is preceeded by a number of "buttons" or links. The meaning of these is as follows:

PacLII Logo or [Home]
Clicking on the PacLII Logo or Home will take you back to the PacLII home page.
[WorldLII]
Jumps to the "WorldLII" opening page. WorldLII is a service that indexes materials which are not on PacLII. It is similar to services such as Yahoo or Google, but is specialised to provide better and more specific coverage of legal materials on other sites.
[Search]
Lets you perform a free text search over the entire PacLII database (or parts of it).
[Feedback]
Takes you to the Feedback page.
[You are here]
Sets out the database or "collection" in which the case is located. You can click on the database, eg the Supreme Court of Vanuatu, to go to the home page for that database. You normally do this if you want to select a different case.
[Recent Decisions]
Displays a reverse chronological list of cases in the database. You can get an alphabetical list on the Database Home Page.
[Noteup]
Searches for materials which refer to the current case. This will display other cases which refer to the current case.
[Context]
This option is available if you have searched for cases using a particular term or terms. It takes you to the first occurrence of the search term or terms.
[Download]
Takes you to the Download menu where you will find instructions for downloading and downloading options.
[Help]
Takes you to this page.

Citing Cases

See here for information about citing cases on PacLII.

Printing Cases

To print a case use the "Print" function of your browser

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URL: http://www.paclii.org/paclii/help/cases.html

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	Case Law Help
You are here: PacLII >> About PacLII >> Help >> Case Law