Public Law Online

Some documents will feature footnotes to further supplement the content, for example with bibliographical references, case citations, comments, etc. Footnotes will be indicated with blue superscript numbers or footnote symbols. To read the footnotes click on the number of symbol and you will be taken to the correct footnote at the bottom of the page. To return to the place in the text, click on the corresponding number next to the footnote.

We offer 2 searches, the case search and the assisted search.

The case search allows you to just search for Judgments. This search template was retained from the previous platform, but has been slightly improved: you can now use the citation field to find neutral citations as well as the publication’s page citation. The search is an exact match search and is great for locating cases for which you already know some of the pertinent details.

Alternatively you can use the assisted search. Covering all the content in your selected practice area (including content that you may not subscribe to yet but might still be of use) this search can be used to locate relevant information. As with most search engines, the more search terms you put in the more specific your returned search results will be. Once you have performed your search, the search results navigation page will show you the number of results in each publication. This means that you can also use the assisted search to search our Law Reports.

For further detail on the searches refer to the section of searching in the helpfile.

The main difference is that the case search only returns results from our Law Reports series whereas the assisted search returns results for all our content.

In addition the case search offers the ability to search fields specific to Law Reports content, (eg by case name, citation, court, Judge, etc) whereas the assisted search offers the ability to search using AND, OR and exact phrases.
For further detail on the searches refer to the section on searching in the helpfile.

Relevance ordering of search results is where the search engine attempts to deliver the best (most relevant) result as the first result on the results summary page. This is achieved by ranking documents using a mathematical algorithm. Relevance is a well established search engine concept which you will have experienced when using search engines like Google and Yahoo, even though you might not have heard of it. The search engine is designed to do the hard work for you.

Our new platform uses a search engine called Lucene. This is a is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library.
From a technical perspective, Lucene scoring uses a combination of the Vector Space Model (VSM) of Information Retrieval and the Boolean model to determine how relevant a given Document is to a User's query. In general, the idea behind the VSM is the more times a query term appears in a document relative to the number of times the term appears in all the documents in the collection, the more relevant that document is to the query. It uses the Boolean model to first narrow down the documents that need to be scored based on the use of boolean logic in the Query specification.

When you perform a case search you have the option to either order your results alphabetically or in order of relevance.

If you order the cases alphabetically they will be returned in strict alphabetical order by casename.

If you order the cases in terms of relevance they will be returned in an order determined by the search engine’s relevance ranking scheme. This is an algorithm that attempts to return the most relevant search result at the top of the list. See the FAQ on relevance for more detail on how this is achieved.

Please note that the number of results returned by the case search will be identical irrespective of which way you order your results.

Click on the practice area button at any time to switch practice areas. The practice area button is located in the bottom left hand corner of the screen.

Click on the helpfile button at any time to open our help file. The help button is located in the bottom left hand corner of the screen.

To scroll up or down the page in either the document view or the Table of Contents when using an iPad or iPad 2, please use two fingers rather than one.