Foreign Law

How to find a case if you have a citation

Lyonette Louis-Jacques, the Foreign and International Law Librarian at the University of Chicago Law Library offers the following tips:

 First, figure out what the abbreviation for the case report stands for.  To do so, use the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations – it’s free and online:

 http://www.legalabbrevs.cardiff.ac.uk/

 So, let’s say you want that famous cannibal case:

 R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) 14 QBD 273, and you don’t know what “QBD” stands for. Plug it into the Cardiff Index and you discover as follows:

Now that you know it’s the “Law Reports, Queen’s Bench Division”, you can search local, nearby library catalogs for holdings.  And you can use the free OPACs or union catalogs to find out who near you owns it.  I like using Open WorldCat (http://worldcat.org/), AMICUS, KVK (Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog), Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and so on.  Depends on what I’m trying to get a copy of and who I know there. 

You search the catalog to see if they have 1884 volumes and then you have three options:

1.       Contact someone you know in available library collections and ask for copies.

2.       Place an interlibrary loan request directly with a particular library.  There might be a document delivery service.

3.       Place an ILL request via OCLC or other established lending and borrowing arrangement.

If famous, sometimes a case is “Wikipedia’ed” so there’s a possibility of links to the full text:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v._Dudley_and_Stephens

 Full text of judgment

• Full text of judgment at HathiTrust.org

If not, you can still locate the full text as reported in a print resource by using Google Books or HathiTrust or Gallica or several other digital libraries  if it’s an old case as these virtual libraries digitize old case reports/reporters :  http://books.google.com/

(Googling generally to get a date if you don’t have one helps)

 And there are the legal information institutes that form part of the Free Access to Law Movement (http://falm.info), but the text there might not be as in the QBD, as reported in the print sources.

 And you always have a fourth option:

 4.       Ask your wonderful  Law Librarians for assistance.