AustLII case law developments

The good people at AustLII have been working on a citator for common law cases and the fruits of their labours can now be checked out at LawCite (Alpha).

LawCite is an international case citator and is the first product of a 3 year Australian Research Council funded project to research into automated systems for citation recognition. The LawCite database is generated on an entirely automatic basis with no editorial input and includes a fairly complete collection of all common law cases cited in the past decade plus most of the important uncited decisions before this. Please note that this is an Alpha version. It is still being built and refined and is being released for public comment only.

As well as using the search form, you can link directly to a LawCite result via a URL link in the following form
http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/LawCite?cit=[1963] 2 All ER 575

Recent standard neutral citations for UK cases don’t seem to be supported yet. According to Joe Ury, BAILII is currently working on its contribution to the project.

Also just launched is the CommonLII database of the English Reports (1220-1873), based on data provided by Justis. The reports are scans in PDF but are full text searchable.

Both projects were developed as part of an Australian Research Council Linkage grant concerning improvements to online case law involving seven industry partners including four courts and tribunals and two legal publishers.