Unreported Cases and BAILII in United Kingdom
From BAILII :
“There is still a restriction on the number of English cases from Divisions of the High Court which can be added to the BAILII database which arises from the fact that the shorthand-writers who transcribe judgments which have been given verbally (as opposed to judgments handed down on paper) own the copyright in the transcribed version of the judgment. This prevents the judgment being added to the BAILII database without the consent of the shorthand-writer. BAILII, being a free web site, has no funds with which to acquire a licence to copy and display the transcript.
Handed down first-instance decisions of the England and Wales and Northern Ireland High Courts are generally only provided to BAILII where the Judge giving the judgment indicates that they are of sufficient interest to be made available for publication on the Internet.
The official version of English judgments of the Court of Appeal and High Court are the Approved Judgments in .rtf format. In most cases the .rtf version is also available on BAILII. When the .rtf version is not available the BAILII web version is not to be taken as official.”
Problems with Neutral Citations
Not every case with a neutral citation will necessarily appear on BAILII, and it is not possible to know which do and which do not.
Some UK databases derives its information on cases’ neutral citations from other legal providers, like the Casetrack data, rather than from BAILII. JustCite, for example, decided to generate a BAILII URL for all neutral citations. Those cases which have a neutral citation but which do not appear on BAILII will return a “no results” message from BAILII upon following the link.
See Also
Neutral citations and BAILII
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