NSW Law Reports

In NSW, as in all other jurisdictions, the court produces a judgment that sets out a decision for the parties involved in a case. Judgments of NSW courts are published on Caselaw, where they are accessible to the community. Judgments from all Australian jurisdictions are also available from AustLII.

Reports – both authorised and unauthorised – are produced by legal publishers such as the Council of Law Reporting for NSW, publisher of the NSWLR. Reports present judgments that are of broader interest to the legal profession and the courts.

 

The courts prefer working with reports rather than judgments because they are more efficient:

• Going straight to the important judgments with precedent value identified by the Editor is a better use of the court’s time than working through unreported judgments that merely follow well established legal principles.

• Judges and lawyers are more likely to be familiar with reported judgments already. They recognise their relevance without undertaking further research.

• The headnotes on reports provide succinct notes with references to the paragraphs where legally significant points are set out. Headnotes on authorised reports in particular are valued because they are offered for review by the courts before publication. The headnotes on unreported judgments, on the other hand, summarise the points of interest only to the parties in the case. The differences between court headnotes and the headnotes on reports were summarised for staff of the NSW Supreme Court in 2007 in a short paper by Dr Ron Desiatnik, an experienced NSWLR reporter and Assistant Editor and the Editor of the NSW District Court Reports.

• The verification of all references and citations in judgments that are published as reports makes reports reliable. (Unreported judgments can contain a surprising number of errors but the courts do not have sufficient resources to check and fix every detail that is not going to be significant to the parties in a case. For example, a reference to paragraph 78 instead of paragraph 89, or the XYZ Act instead of the WXYZ Act, won’t make any difference to the decision set out in a judgment but the correction will make the judgment easier to cite as a precedent in future.)

The court’s preference for reports rather than judgments in NSW is captured in Court of Appeal Practice Note SC CA 1 of 14 April 2008, where the Chief Justice limits the list of authorities to be cited in a case.

For information about how reports such as the NSWLR are produced, go to Publishing process