LawCite is a citator for cases and journal articles from around the world, focusing mainly on common law legal systems. It was developed by the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) in collaboration with BAILII and other legal information institutes.
Access
LawCite is freely available to all, as part of the Free Access to Law Movement.
Content
The LawCite database indexes more than 18,000 law reports and journals from more than 75 jurisdictions. It lists all known cases, journal articles and law reform reports referring to each case or journal article that it covers. Frequently-cited cases or articles are marked with gold stars, each star indicating about fifty citations. LawCite also gives details of legislation, cases and articles cited in each case or journal article.
Because the case citations are automatically generated, LawCite does not say whether a case is still good law. Appeals are not explicitly mentioned, but the first instance decision and appeal will very often come up together in search results.
Links to the full text of cases and articles are given if they are available on a free website; otherwise, LawCite gives the name of the commercial database which has the full text.
Searching
LawCite can be searched by law report / journal citation, party name, court, jurisdiction, article title, author, date, cases/legislation cited.
Search results are usually displayed with the most frequently-cited items appearing at the top, with cases, articles and law reform documents appearing in separate tables. If there are more than 5,000 search results, they will be listed in reverse chronological order, in a single table. To change the sort order, click on a column heading: for example, to sort by party name, click on Case Name.
Printing and Downloading
To print a LawCite record, right-click on the page and select ‘Print’.
To download, right-click on the page and select ‘Save as’.
Help
‘Help’ links are available at the top of the screen, and to the right of the search and search results pages.
Accessibility
View BAILII's accessibility information
BAILII is partially compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and provides content in accessible formats where possible.
Some older content is provided as PDFs that do not meet accessibility standards.