What is the 'it'?

From a citation point of view, I am inclined to treat the case names that appear as side titles in law reports as gospel. (I am talking about the titles that run down the side of the page, not the ones that run across the top of the page; those have their own problems.) So it hurts when I find one that doesn’t really work. It hurts even more when I find one that is out and out wrong.

Take a bow, R v Quinn; Ex parte Consolidated Foods Corporation (1977) 138 CLR 1.

Or don’t.

The side title says “Food”. The title, the table of cases for the relevant volume, and the substantive content of the judgments in the case all point in one direction: that the side title is wrong. It should have said “Foods”.

What to do? Technically you would be correct to use “Food”, because that is what the side title says. But “technically” it is also wrong. And two wrongs, they tell me, don’t make a right.

Given that I have been telling High Court associates for the past 25 years that if they see a side title they should use it, it is interesting that many of the references to the case that Dr Google has taken me to have adopted “Foods”. This might, I suppose, mean that other people take less notice of what is in the side title than I do. It might also suggest that the associates I have worked with take less notice of what I tell them than I had been led to believe. (And, in this instance at least, proving that they were correct to do so.)

Still, the whole point of side titles was that you didn’t have to look beyond them in order to decide what name to give to a case. I’m not going to change my approach on the strength of one bad apple. But I have added this one to my list of anomalies.