The Council of Law Reporting for NSW undertakes special projects relevant to law reporting that it considers may be of interest to people engaged in the administration or practice of law in New South Wales.
Council projects include, or have included, the following:
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From 1901 to 1970, reports of significant judgments in NSW were published in the State Reports (New South Wales) series, cited as the SR(NSW).
Much of the material in the 72 volumes of the SR(NSW) has an enduring value to the legal profession. The Council of Law Repotring for NSW has therefore published a consolidated index and tables for the series, making the reports accessible to contemporary practitioners.
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Using sources such as the Sydney Gazette and manuscripts held by State Records NSW, Macquarie University's Professor Bruce Kercher and his colleague Brent Salter have prepared a volume of law reports from the first days of the NSW colony to the Dowling period. The volume will be published in 2009 by Federation Press for the Francis Forbes Society for Australian Legal History with the assistance of the Council for Law Reporting for NSW. "The Kercher Reports" will be the second volume in the series of law reports known as "New South Wales Select Cases". The first volume was Dowling's Select Cases, 1828-1844.
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James Dowling, a barrister and accomplished law reporter from England, took up an appointment as a judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales in 1828. He left nine notebooks containing reports of 465 cases decided during the sixteen years that he served as a judge of the Court and as the colony's second Chief Justice.
Dowling's reports, edited by TD Castle & Professor Kercher as Dowling's Select Cases 1828-1844, were published in 2005 by the Forbes Society with the assistance of the Council, Macquarie University, the NSW Bar Association and the Maitland Fund.
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The Council of Law Reporting is the University of Sydney's industry partner in a three-year Australian Research Council (ARC) linkage project, 2007-2009, exploring the use of XML meta-data in legal documents.
The purpose of the project is to develop an ontology, or hierarchical structuring, of the key concepts in case law and the relationships between them. These could then be recognised and tagged to facilitate concept-based searches and cost-effective indexing that is at least partially automated. The technology that the project aims to develop should improve the flexibility and utility of NSWLR data.
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