Citators provide details of cases which have subsequently considered a particular case. This helps you to determine whether the case is still good law.
Citators also provide the some or all of the following information about a case: court, date of decision, medium neutral and law report citations, legislation and cases cited in the decision. Many citators (such as CaseBase and FirstPoint) require a subscription, but there are several free options:
| LawCite |
- Coverage: international (varies by country)
- Contains over 4 million documents from AustLII, BAILII, CanLII, WorldLII and selected other members of the Free Access to Law movement.
- Search by citation, party names, court, jurisdiction, legislation cited, cases cited.
- Provides ‘cases referring to this case’, ‘legislation cited’ and ‘cases and articles cited’.
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| AustLII Note-up |
- Coverage: all material on AustLII
- Locate the case on AustLII, then click on the ‘Note-up’ link in the menu just above the case name. This will run a search across all of the material on AustLII for references to the case.
- Results may include cases, journal articles, law reform commission reports etc.
- Click on ‘context’ to link to the part of the document which cites the case.
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| Jade CaseTrace |
- Coverage: Australian cases on Jade
- Use the search box at the top of the screen to locate a case, then look for the ‘CaseTrace’ box to the right of the judgment (it will only appear if the judgment has been subsequently cited). Alternatively, scroll to the bottom of the screen to find the citator information.
- Provides paragraph level information about citing cases, which means that citing cases are listed next to the relevant paragraph of the judgment. It can save reading lots of decisions which cite the primary case for a different point of law. It is the only citator (free or commercial) which provides paragraph level information for Australian cases.
- Click on ‘full report’ or scroll to the end of the judgment to see ‘cases citing this case’, ‘cases cited by this case’ and ‘legislation cited by this case’.
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| Jade Citator |
- Coverage: decisions cited by Australian cases on Jade (i.e. wider scope than Jade CaseTrace)
- Use the ‘citation search‘ to locate subsequent references to a particular case. Type in the party names or the citation into the ‘citations of’ field. Matching cases will appear as you type. Once you have located the case, use the ‘cited sections’ menu on the left hand side of the screen to narrow the results to decisions which have cited a particular page / paragraph of the case.
- Use the ‘citator search‘ to locate cases by subject. Click in the ‘tag’ field and select a subject heading. There are other filters you can use as well, such as court / law report series (use the ‘collection’ field).
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Last updated: 8 January 2015
