All case reports are referenced by the case name and what is known as the citation. These citations refer to the specific page and volume of the Law Report in which the case is reported; however, these citations are still used even with electronic databases and also enable you to identify a unique case from others with similar names, e.g.
Miller v Jackson [1977] QB 966 (CA)
In this case, Miller v Jackson are the names of the parties involved in the case, and the full report can be found in the 1977 volume of the Queen's Bench Law Reports, beginning at page (or paragraph) 966.
Since 2001, cases from the Court of Appeal and the High Court have used neutral citations, which identifies the case and jurisdiction (eg England and Wales) and the court (eg Court of Appeal), without reference to a specific series of Law Reports, e.g.
Apple Corps Ltd v Apple Computer Inc [2006] EWHC 996 (Ch)
Law reports are not produced officially or centrally. There are a great number of law reports series produced by a variety of publishers. Some law reports series are devoted to the proceedings of a particular court, some to a particular area of law, some to a particular region, and some are weekly or monthly round-ups. As a result there is often overlap, with cases being relevant or of interest to more than one series of law reports and therefore being reported in numerous places.
There is a hierarchy to law reports, with the Law Reports (note the capitals!) being the most authoritative, i.e. Queen's Bench (QB), Chancery (Ch), Family (Fam) and Appeal Cases (AC). These should always be used first. These are followed by the Weekly Law Reports, then the All England Law Reports, followed by the various specialist law report series that focus on a specific area of law, i.e. criminal, commercial etc. When you see a case with multiple citations you will notice that they are listed in this order, with the most authoritative first.
Not even close. Many thousands of cases are heard annually in courts in England and Wales, but only about 5% of these are written up as law reports. This is because the vast majority of cases are fairly standard, 'run of the mill' cases that do not contribute to the body of law in any way. There may be substantial public interest in certain cases but this does not mean they are noteworthy from a legal perspective. With these kind of cases your best source of information will be newspaper articles - however, bear in mind these often present information with an agenda in mind, depending on the newspaper in question and the angle of the article, and don't always report the full facts!
Judges do not decide whether a case is written up as a law report; this decision is made by the editors of the law report series. The general criteria includes: "whether the case introduces, or appears to introduce, a new principle or a new rule of law; whether it materially modifies an existing principle of rule of law; whether it settles, or materially tends to settle, a question upon which the law is doubtful; or if it is, for any reason, peculiarly instructive."
If you are interested in further details of law reporting, this is the text of an excellent plenary talk delivered by Daniel Hoadley of ICLR (Incorporated Council of Law Reporting) on the topic (which your friendly local academic librarian attended and can personally recommend!)
The transcript is simply a record of the court's judgment, either a written judgment 'handed down' or an extempore verbal judgment delivered in court - in effect, a unedited summary of 'what the court said'. The law report is a more complete, proof-read and checked, edited summary of the case. It will contain all of the information contained in the judgement but it will also have been subject to often substantial editorial enhancement, including 'catchwords', keywords or abbreviated summaries; 'the headnote', a condensed summary of the case defining the principles of law involved; the 'blocklist', cases referred to or cited during the proceedings; and the 'facts', usually a short paragraph summarising the facts of the case, the context and history of the proceedings.
The quickest place to find legislation is via the government's main portal, legislation.gov.uk This will provide all the legislation that governs both the UK and the devolved governments of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as EU legislation that may still apply to the UK after Brexit.
You can usually find both the current version of the legislation, and also the originally enacted version. This can be useful as changes are often made to legislation, wording amended, sections repealed etc, so you may need to know what it used to be and what it is now.
You can also use Westlaw to find legislation as well. Depending on what kind of legal information you need alongside the legislation, this may be a more useful option, as Westlaw can also link you to cases and journal articles that mention or refer to specific pieces of legislation or even sections within an act, so you get not just the text of the law but all the relevant information alongside it as well.
An Act of Parliament is the main piece of legislation that governs a topic or issue, known as primary legislation. It spells out the broad details of what the law says and what its purpose is. It doesn't go into lots of detail, however, and often needs secondary legislation to bring some of the provisions into force - i.e. to spell out exactly what the law will work, who is responsible for overseeing and enforcing it, what the penalties might be, what the fine details are. This is where a Statutory Instrument comes in - it spells out all of the fine details that are not included in the main Act. A Statutory Instrument is usually drawn up by civil servants and doesn't need to go through Parliament to be approved - it means adjustments can be easily made without needing to go through the whole Parliamentary process again.
The titles of law journals and law reports are often abbreviated - for example, the Competition Law Journal would be abbreviated to Comp.L.J, or a case citation might include WLR, which stands for Weekly Law Reports. These abbreviations can be difficult to decipher if you are not familiar with the journal in question.
If you need to find the full title, use a guide to legal abbreviations. The best is the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations. This will give you the preferred abbreviation in addition to alternative occasionally used, as well as the jurisdiction covered.
The list below includes some of the more heavily used journals subscribed to by the Library, along with their corresponding abbreviations:
OSCOLA stands for Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities. It is the preferred referencing style for all UK law schools.
OSCOLA uses the footnoting system of referencing, i.e. it does not use in-text citations like Harvard - (Smith 2009), for example - but uses a number in superscript that corresponds to a footnote at the bottom of the page and a bibliography at the end of the work.
There is more information on Harvard referencing under the 'Referencing' tab of this guide. You can also download the full OSCOLA guide for free from the OSCOLA website. The University also subscribes to an excellent online referencing tool called Cite Them Right, although it does not have as many examples for OSCOLA as for Harvard.