CommonLII (Commonwealth Legal Information Institute)

Open access

CommonLII (Commonwealth Legal Information Institute)

Open access

CommonLII contains over 1,400 databases of legal material from 60 jurisdictions, as well as links to law websites. It is part of the Free Access to Law movement.  

Content
CommonLII covers the member states of the Commonwealth; dependencies and territories; and common law jurisdictions outside the Commonwealth (Hong Kong, Ireland and Myanmar). 

The amount of content varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction:-

• legislation and/or case law are available for 60 jurisdictions
   
• law reform publications, law journals and/or treaties are available for some jurisdictions
   
• general Commonwealth material, including declarations and agreements issued by the Commonwealth, a database of Commonwealth human rights decisions, Privy Council decisions, and newsletters of the Commonwealth Legal Education Association (CLEA)
   
• links to government and legal websites are available for all jurisdictions.

Other content includes:-

• the English Reports series, a reprint of historical law reports covering the period 1220-1873
   
• LawCite, a case citator covering millions of cases, journal articles and law reform reports from common law jurisdictions, including numerous Commonwealth countries, Ireland, the United States and Hong Kong  

Searching
The basic search facility covers all the CommonLII databases. 

Advanced Search allows you to limit your search to legislation, cases, the highest courts, law journals, law reform publications, or all databases. The ‘Find’ drop-down menu offers search options including ‘all of these words’, ‘any of these words’, ‘this phrase’ and, ‘this document title’. 

An overview of connectors and other search operators can be found under Help.

Browsing
You can browse CommonLII by jurisdiction, region and other categories. 

Reading 
The majority of content is available to read online in either HTML or accessible PDF format.