Search of Case Laws

Dhyey Desai, A-047

What is a Case Law?
• Case law is the collection of past legal decisions written by
courts and similar tribunals in the course of deciding cases.

• Record of judgement given in any case.

• Becomes part of the body of the law.

Doctrine of Precedent
• The ‘doctrine of precedent’ is the rule that a legal principle that has
been established by a superior court should be followed in other
similar cases by that court and other courts.

• ‘Binding’ on a court if the precedent was made by a superior court that

is higher in the hierarchy of courts.

• ‘Persuasive’ if it was established by a superior court that is not higher

in the hierarchy of courts.
Reported Case Laws

• Only a small proportion of cases decided by the courts are reported.

• Cases are selected by the Law Report Editor and not the Courts.

• Cases selected for reports falls under a criteria.

Reporting Criteria
To be reported, a case must :
• Raise a point of legal significance.

• Materially modify an existing principle of law or settle a doubtful

question of law.

• May include questions of interpretation of statutes and important

cases illustrating new application of accepted principles.
The Law Reports
The only authorized Indian law report series is the Supreme Court
Reports (SCR).
Because of the long delay in publication of the SCR, some of the
unauthorized reports in academic works, and to hand up in court are:
• All India Reporter (AIR) - This series is often cited in preference to
the SCR and in Indian courts it has the status of an authorized series.
• Cases from SCC Online are equally acceptable in court and to cite in
academic writing.
The most cited law report series containing Supreme Court decisions
is SCC followed by AIR and SCR. 
Unreported Judgements/Neutral Citations
• Transcripts are unreported version of a judgement.

• Although judgements are “published” on websites, they remain

unreported unless published in a Law Report Series.

• They can often be cited as neutral citations.

How legal cases are cited?
• Every legal case citation has two basic parts, separated by a comma.
The first part contains the case name. The second part contains case
citation information: the year of the decision, the law reporter(s), and
the name of the court where the case was tried.
Find a case by name or citation
You will most often search for a case on a website by either:
• 1) case name, or,
• 2) case citation
A case name is the name applied to a legal case and is based on the abbreviated names of the parties
involved in the case. Example case names:
• R v Sun Glow Foodservice Ltd
• Moore v Bertuzzi
• All legal databases will provide an option to search by case name. Often, the v can be omitted from
your search. Note that if the case went through multiple levels of court, you will want to know a bit
more about the case, such as the trial year, to identify the correct case from your search results.
• A case citation refers to either the full case citation (including the case name), or a portion of the
citation which lists court reporter information, year, and jurisdiction. When searching legal
databases, the case citation search option usually means the latter.
Sources for Finding Case Laws
• If you know the case you are looking for, and it is reported in
either the Supreme Court Reports (SCR) or SCC Online (SCC),
use SCR first, then SCC.

• Most of these reports are available online and the law library
have print form of these reports which are updated at regular
intervals.
Online Sources
If it reported in neither of these series, use another report series
or an unreported version such as

• Manupatra - has a sophisticated search engine to either look for

keywords or subjects or search sing case types and topics.

• Indian Kanoon - contains unreported decisions that are more up

to date.
THANK YOU