25 - Finding Legal Information Online Flashcards
General…
When you are looking for UK and EU cases and legislation, a good starting point is to search JustCite. It is a search engine that allows you to search across a range of legal resources.
It gives you key information and directs you to the full text documents from other providers such as Lexis®Library and Westlaw UK.
Cases…
Start from the Law subject guide
How to get there: From the library home page at: www.library.dmu.ac.uk, click on ‘Subject guides’ and select Law
Click on the ‘Cases’ tab and use the JustCite search box in the middle part of the screen to find the case
If you are outside the university, use the ‘JustCite’ heading on the right instead, so you can enter your Single Sign On details and be recognised as a DMU student.
The courts are listed on the right hand side. If a case has been heard in more than one court, the most recent and highest court will be listed at the top
When a case is reported in a series of law reports, it is given a case citation. Each legal citation includes a year, a volume number (usually), the acronym of the series of law reports in which the case was reported, and a page/case number. This information will enable you to find the case in the Law Library.
The same case (in the same court) can have more than one citation because the case can be reported in more than one series of law reports.
Some law reports are considered more authoritative than others. Citations are listed in order of authority on the right of the screen with the most authoritative citation indicated by the yellow pointer.
JustCite also gives you information about how different cases are related to each other: The map is a visual representation of all the cases that are related to the case.
These include previous cases (on the left) which have been cited during the trial, as well as subsequent cases (on the right) which have referred to the case.
The colour of the arrow is important too. A green arrow indicates a positive treatment, a red arrow a negative one, and a yellow arrow a neutral treatment.
