NSW Law Reports

The NSWLR publishing process involves five main steps:

1. The NSWLR Editor, Bret Walker SC, considers the judgments and decisions of NSW courts and tribunals - notably the Supreme Court (Court of Appeal, Court of Criminal Appeal) - and selects those judgments that will be significant in the development, interpretation and/or application of the law in NSW. Of the thousands of judgments delivered by the courts each year, less than 10 percent are reported. The Editor's selection shows practitioners and researchers which decisions are most important in the development, application or interpretation of the law in NSW.

2. The NSWLR Assistant Editors, Ms Beatrice Gray and Dr Ron Desiatnik, oversee the drafting of headnotes by Reporters with expertise in the relevant area of law. Headnotes include catchwords that are based on the subject matter index so they are efficient to use in legal research. The court is invited to comment on proposed headnotes, which may be amended to incorporate judges' suggestions.

3. Staff in the Council’s editorial office verify the judgment. All citations, quotations and references are painstakingly checked and corrected where necessary, and the text is styled so that it is clear and consistent with editorial conventions. Reports published in the NSWLR will be a basic legal reference for many decades to come so the Council invests considerable resources in presenting them as accurately and elegantly as possible. Significant irregularities or ambiguities identified through the verification and copyediting of NSWLR are referred to the court; the judge may subsequently revise the relevant passage of the judgment for publication on Caselaw.

4. Once the headnote has been approved by the Editor and reviewed by the court, the report is typeset electronically. This makes the formatting and referencing - including pagination, paragraph and line breaks - hold true when the report is printed and wherever it is published online. This ensures the reliability of NSWLR references in court.

5. A subject matter index and accurate tables of cases and statutes cited in a part are generated electronically, then checked manually, once all of the reports in the part have been completed. Similarly, an index and tables for a bound volume are generated electronically once the five parts of the volume have been completed.

In order to maintain the quality and reliabiltiy standards set by the Council of Law Reporting, all material published in the NSWLR is checked, cross-checked and checked again - from both legal and editorial perspectives - at each stage in the publishing process.