Case citation Totally Explained

Everything about Case Citation totally explained

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Case citation is the system used in many countries to identify the decisions in past court cases, either in special series of books called reporters or law reports, or in a 'neutral' form which will identify a decision wherever it was reported. Although case citations are formatted differently in different jurisdictions, they generally contain the same key information.
Where cases are published in paper form the citation will usually contain:

the title of the reports;
the volume number;
page number; and
year of decision.

In some report series, for example in England and Australia, the volumes are not numbered independently of the year: thus the year and volume number (usually no greater than 4) are required to identify which book of the series has the case reported within its covers. In citations of this type it's usual in these jurisdictions for square brackets "[year]" to be applied to the year (which may not be the year that the case was decided: for example, a case decided in December 2001 may have been reported in 2002).
The Internet brought with it the opportunity for courts to publish their decisions on web sites. Decisions of many courts from all over the world can now be found through the website WorldLII and its member institutes.
Most decisions of courts are not published in printed law reports. The expense of typesetting and publishing them has limited the printed law reports to the significant cases. Internet publishing of court decisions resulted in a flood of information. The result was that a medium-neutral citation system had to be adopted. This usually contains the following information:

year of decision

the abbreviated title of the court; and

the decision number (not the court file number) Rather than utilizing page numbers for pin-point references, which would depend upon particular printers and browsers, pin-point quotes refer to paragraph numbers.

Australia

The standard case citation format in Australia is:

Style of cause	(year of decision)	[yearof reporter]	volume	reporter	(series)	page
Mabo v Queensland (No 2)	(1992)		175	CLR		1.

Like in Canada, there has been divergence between citation styles. There exists commercial citation guides published by Butterworths and other legal publishing companies, academic citation styles and court citation styles. Each court in Australia may cite the same cases slightly differently. There is presently a movement in convergence to the comprehensive academic citation style of the Australian Guide to Legal Citation published by the Melbourne University Law Review.

Reports

Abbreviation	Reporter	Years
AAR	Administrative Appeals Reports	-
ALJR	Australian Law Journal Reports	-
ALR	Australian Law Reports	1983 -
CLR	Commonwealth Law Reports	1903 -
FLC	Family Law Cases
FLR	Federal Law Reports	-
NSWLR	New South Wales Law Reports	-
Qld R	Queensland Reports	-
VR	Victorian Reports	-

Neutral citation

Australian courts and tribunals have now adopted a neutral citation standard for case law. The format provides a naming system that doesn't depend on the publication of the case in a law report. Most cases are now published on AustLII using neutral citations.
The standard format looks like this:

Year of decision	Court identifier	Ordinal number
[2005]	HCA	1

So the above mentioned Mabo case would then be cited like this: [1992] HCA 23.
There is a unique court identifier code for most courts. The court and tribunal identifiers include:

Court Identifier	Court
HCA	High Court of Australia
FCA	Federal Court of Australia
FCAFC	Federal Court of Australia - Full Court (Appeals bench)
FamCA	Family Court of Australia
FMCA	Federal Magistrates' Court of Australia
FMCAfam	Federal Magistrates' Court of Australia, family law decisions
AAT	Administrative Appeals Tribunal of Australia

Further Information

Get more info on 'Case Citation'.

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