Case Citators and Digests

If you have a case name, citators are an efficient way of:

• finding the correct citation of a case and alternate or parallel citations (that is, other sources where a case may be reported)
• finding other cases on a topic
• finding academic commentary on a case

Digests of cases are also provided with many of the online case citators. Digests are essentially summaries of the main points of the case and they help the researcher decide on the relevance of the case to the issues researched. Digests also provide a topic based approach to locating relevant cases.

On this page we will look at the two major Australian citators, in addition to Keycite (available on Westlaw), a citator of Australian and foreign law.

• FirstPoint
• CaseBase
• Keycite

FirstPoint

• Download FirstPoint QuickGuide

FirstPoint is a database of case digests of reported Australian case law, from 1825, and unreported Australian cases from 1999, with links to the full text of decisions themselves (where available). FirstPoint may be browsed by subject and then sub-topic; or searched by party name, citation; court, judge, date, digest, etc.

The search screen is displayed below in the right hand panel (the left panel shows the browse option – see 'Digests' for more information). There are specific fields by which to search, or you could simply use the 'Free text search' box.

A search on the parties ' cattanach and melchior' (note the use of and in place of v)...

...yields the following results (see below). You will note that 4 brief records are displayed, which might reflect the fact that the parties took the matter through various courts (including the Supreme Court of Queensland and the Queensland Court of Appeal) before reaching the High Court of Australia.

If we choose the High Court of Australia decision by selecting the case name, we are given fuller details of the High Court decision, including the citation to the case in the CLR, and the alternate (parallel) citations to the same decision, in other law report series. Other information provided includes the court, judges, date of the decision, digest (summary) of the main legal issues, cases cited by the High Court within the decision itself, and cases which have subsequently cited Cattanach v Melchior as authority.

Clicking on the citation hyperlinks will take you to the full-text of the decision itself.

FirstPoint is available via LawBook Online.

CaseBase

• Dowload the guide to researching cases on CaseBase

CaseBase is an online case citator with annotations, covering Australian and some overseas cases, including unreported decisions from all Australian jurisdictions. It also indexes articles in law journals. There are some useful online guides and tutorials to searching for other types of information on this platform.

CaseBase is available on the LexisNexis AU platform. A screenshot of the CaseBase Search homepage is shown below.

There are a number of ways to search CaseBase, some of the options are displayed in the screenshot above, and include by case name, reference to an Act (that is, cases which discuss, analyse, interpret provisions of a Act), catchwords, case citation, date of judgment, court and judge.

Like the example above in FirstPoint, your search may retrieve more than one case. CaseBase displays your results in reverse chronological order (the most recent decision first). The Source Type list in the left panel provides the context for the retireved results, more relevant when you are searching across a number of publications on the LNAU platform. In this instance, as we are only searching the one publication database – CaseBase – the utility of this feature is limited.

Results Display

CaseBase provides the following information (see screen shot below):

• case citation and alternate or parallel citations
• cases referring to your case
• journal articles referring to your case
• cases considered by your case
• legislation considered by your case
• words and phrases
• catchwords / digest

Keycite

The Keycite feature on Westlaw works as a citator function for Australian, UK, US , Canadian, NZ and Hong Kong case law. It offers a comparative aspect to your research because, for example, by searching for an Australian case it searches for the citation of that decision in English, New Zealand and Canadian law.

Keycite by Citation

• log in to Westlaw
  
• select the Keycite tab on the grey toolbar and the following screen appears
  
• enter the citation to the case you require
  and
• select the country (where the decision originates) from the Publication Country drop down box.

You can also search for a case by case name (known as Keycite by Title). Use this search type carefully to avoid retrieving a large set of results.

The screen below is the results screen for the first "search hit", and it defaults to information about the decision (note the 'Related Info' tab in the left panel) – not the decision itself. Clicking on the Result List takes you to the list of all your research results