The case law databases contain the decisions of judges in matters before a court or tribunal. In each decision the judge will 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. As a result, case law is often important in understanding how particular acts of parliament operate and apply day to day.
The ULII case law databases include hypertext links to most relevant material. This generally includes 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 language writing, and legal writing in particular. You should also bear in mind that links to acts go to the current version of the act, not necessarily the version of the act that applied to the facts of the case.
At this time, we have limited access to full text legislation for countries covered by ULII, but anticipate activating this useful feature in future.
Using Cases
Each case is preceded by a number of links. The meaning of these is as follows:
|
Clicking on the ULII Logo will take you back to the SAFLII home page. |
|
Takes you to the index or home page for the current database or "collection". You normally do this if you want to continue browsing for additional cases. |
|
Lets you perform a search over the entire ULII database (or parts of it). For details on using our search engine, see our online Search Help. |
|
Searches for all materials which refer to the current case. This will display all other cases which refer to this case. |
|
Clicking "Download" will take you to a page that will allow you to download the case in RTF (Rich Text Format) and/or ASCII (plain text). Sometimes we may not have any downloadable versions of the case available - in this situation you can use your web browser's "File > Save as" function to download the online version of the case. |
|
This document has been created using Optical Character Recognition software. ULII primarily sources documents from the originating courts. Sometimes this involves scanning of hardcopy documents which are in turn read by an Optical Character Recognition software and converted to HTML for display purposes. An authentic copy of the image of the document with underlying text is stored as a PDF file and made available for download through the Link to PDF of original document facility. The PDF version of such OCR'd documents should be your preferred version of the document. |
 ]Clicking "Context" will take you to the first of the search terms for which you searched which occurs in the decision. Note that this option only appears when you have used the ULII search engine to find the decision. |
|
Displays this help page. |
A full list of the cases databases available from ULII may be found on the SAFLII Databases page.
Searching for Cases
Database Coverage
When searching for cases, particularly older cases, you should check the ULII Databases page to ensure that we hold cases from the court or tribunal and for the years in which you are interested. Alternatively, you can check the individual case database "index" or home pages for this information.
Database Last Updated Date
Each cases database includes a database "last updated" date on the database index page. This is the date that ULII last updated the database and does not necessarily indicate currency. The database is updated from data received from the court or tribunal. Although some courts and tribunals send their data in batches, many provide their data as soon as it is available. Once SAFLII has received the data, it is generally available on our website within 24 hours.
By Party Name
Autosearch: When searching for a case by party names using the auto-search search type, start with the most general search and then, if necessary, refine it by making it more specific. For example, if you were searching for the case named "Maulid Makame Ali v Kesi Khamis Vuai", you should start with a search for "Ali v Vuai". This search returns the relevant results, whereas a search for the full names of the parties would fail because the Court has abbreviated the first party's name to just the surname.
Boolean: When searching for case names using the boolean search type, you can use the near operator to find cases involving two parties. For example, to find cases where Doeseb sued (or was sued by) Kheibeb, you would start with the more general search and type: doseb near kheibeb. Again, you could make this more specific if necessary, but it is always best to start with a general search using just the parties' surnames because Courts sometimes abbreviate parties' names to just the surname or just the initials plus surname. Additionally, in cases which have many parties, Courts sometimes abbreviate the case name to, for example, Smith and Anor v Brown & Ors - where Anor means Another and Ors means Others.
By Date
When searching using the Boolean search type, you can limit the search results by year by searching the title field for the case name and for the year within 10 words of the title like this:
title(Minister for Home Affairs w/10 2006)
For cases, the date in the title is usually the date on which the decision was handed down.
Printing Cases
To print a case you can either use the "File > Print" function of your web browser, or click the [Download] link at the top of the page to get the RTF or ASCII version (where available) of the case, open it in your favourite word processor, and print it from there. Where judgments were OCR'd (scanned using text recognition software) you will have the option of downloading a PDF version of the document using the Link to PDF of original document link. If the page says that "No downloadable files are available" this means that ULII does not have a separate downloadable version of the item.
To eliminate the search term highlighting so that you can print a decision which you found by using the ULII search engine, the quickest solution is click on the [Hide Context
] link. You should now be looking at the decision without any search term highlighting.
About the Markup
Cases are "marked up" (ie hypertext links inserted) on a massively automated basis. We are constantly improving this process to add functionality. If you have suggestions, these are more than welcome. Please bear in mind that the mark up process is essentially heuristic in nature - that is, it is approximate. If you think that you can suggest a general approach to better taking into account the salient features which are inherent in most case law databases, please send us feedback.