The High Court style guide has a somewhat terse approach to book citations. No first names or initials, just a surname. (Exceptions are occasionally made, if not necessarily encouraged, in relation to names attaching to more than one prominent author. “Stone”, for example. Or “Wade”.) And edition numbers are only given for editions other than… Continue reading

[No, that is not a misplaced apostrophe. All of my questions seem to come from one reader. They know who they are.] Not long before I disappeared for eye surgery – which has gone very well, thank you for asking – I found myself fielding some citation questions concerning a High Court case called New… Continue reading

Your judge wants to cite the case of Re Lehrer and the Real Property Act – or, for that matter, any case reported in the State Reports of New South Wales between 1956 and 1963. Re Lehrer is a 1960 decision of the New South Wales Supreme Court. The judge has found a reference to… Continue reading

Quality control at the Commonwealth Law Reports has always been admirably high. But occasionally they do get something wrong. If your judge were to refer in a judgment to the case of R v Quinn; Ex parte Consolidated Foods Corporation (1977) 138 CLR 1, and if, in proofing that judgment, you were diligently to follow… Continue reading

Riddle me this, Batman: when is an anonymisation not an anonymisation? Answer: when it is somebody’s name, and it only looks like an anonymisation. Exhibit one: “SKA” or “Ska”? The latter is a dance craze from Jamaica that was popular in London circa 1980. You may have heard of Madness. (See above.) Or The Specials.… Continue reading

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… Continue reading

In the book I say some possibly heretical things about what name you should give to a case that your judge is citing. But I also say that, generally speaking, when you see a side title (ie, a case name that runs down the outside margin of the pages in a law report) you can… Continue reading

There was a time, long ago, when lawyers could occasionally convince their clients to fly them to London in order to have an appeal in their case heard by the members of the Privy Council. (Did they fly first class? It would be tawdry to speculate.) Those were indeed the days. Like all good things,… Continue reading

If you have looked at an English law report in recent years, and in particular one of the many reports published by Sweet & Maxwell, you may have noticed that some of them have taken to giving each reported case its own case number. The Criminal Appeal Reports is a good example; it is a… Continue reading

Second reading speeches are the things where the relevant Minister stands up in Parliament and extols the virtues of some proposed piece of legislation before putting it to the House for a vote. Courts can refer to these to ascertain the intention of Parliament when faced with legislation that is – perish the thought –… Continue reading