This guide is intended for students and researchers at the University of Oxford needing to find the case law of the countries of the common law or Anglo-American legal tradition and those jurisdictions with a mixed legal tradition with a common law element.
Use this guide to find out where to find the reported decisions, judgments, rulings of the courts of common law jurisdictions and also the transcripts of unreported cases.
Published law report series are usually available only via subscription databases (which require an Oxford SSO for online access).
Knowing in which country the case was heard is not always as easy/obvious as you might assume with English as a common language! Fortunately, jurisdiction is included on the results screen of searches in the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations - so if you don't know/aren't sure, you could type in the abbreviation from your citation to see possible jurisdictions.
When you know the country/jurisdiction, use the tabs (and the drop down menus of some of them) to find relevant databases for that country.
Alternatively, if you know the name of the law report series you need to consult, the first link below can be quicker to use than searching SOLO.
A court case may well achieve great coverage in the media - newspapers, TV & radio, Twitter and other social media - and yet NOT be published in a law report series. To be published in a law report series, the case must be of legal importance, that is develop the law in some way.
As a result of digital publishing, transcripts of judgements (including both those later published in a report series and those left unreported) are becoming increasingly available, either via subscription databases or in the common law world, the network of Legal Information Institute websites. (These are thanks to the Free Access to Law Movement (FALM))This guide also acts as a portal to these sources.
For tracking down the general media's reaction to causes célèbres, national and local newspapers can be a rich resource
