Case law
Case law is the beating heart of law. It is that part of the law made by lawyers. Two teams of lawyers come to court armed to the full with legal precedents, ready to argue their case in the shifting sands of fact. The judge, a former combatant, now sits and brings to bear his or her own legal knowledge to view the facts, hear the arguments and to reach a conclusion, producing a judgment which itself adds to the case law available for argument in future cases.
All lawyers know this as students. Unfortunately the rigours of real world law militate against case law research in practice. Case law research takes time, and clients do not always wish to pay for it. Second, as a student, you have a sensible prospect that a question posed by a lecturer will have a positive and direct answer. In real life, answers have to be created, and sometimes this is not possible. Third, the case law resources available to a lawyer outside very large practices are limited to one or two series of case reports. The chances that such resources will include any particular case are small, and many attempts at case law research end simply in frustration. Equally, practitioners come to specialise in smaller areas of law, and feel that case law is less relevant. I see this as a mistake. Anyone reading case law will see regularly that often a judge’s decision in one area of law in informed, at the very least, by case law from another area of law. Effective law practice is a creative process. A client calls in with a problem. A lawyer takes the situation, examines it from a slightly different aspect, and is able to construct an answer. That creativity is fed by the availability of a wider resource base than is encouraged by promoters of specialisation.
THe UK case law database makes such research much more effective, allowing case law research to become a practical possibility.
- Range of coverage.
- We have cases from 1222 until yesterday (and often today). More importantly, we have many cases from the ‘missing years’ from 1866 to 1996. We include case
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