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Case Law Help


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

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:

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:

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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