Using materials
You would have realised by now that you need relevant and authoritative information to better understand your assigned case and to make compelling arguments about its impact. How do you go about finding such information?
As a start, look for the case in a case citator such as CaseBase (Lexis) or FirstPoint (Westlaw). There are also two freely available case citators, LawCite (AustLII) and Jade (BarNet). See if you can find Getachew v The Queen [2011] VSCA 164.
The first thing you should check when you find the case in the case citator is the citation. Has the case been reported or is it still unreported (with a medium neutral, or court, citation)? If it has been reported, which report series should you choose? Make sure you use the authorised citation if there is one, eg VR (Victorian Reports) or CLR (Commonwealth Law Reports).
Think about your answer to the question below and then flip the card. Use the blue arrows to navigate to the next card.
Case citators also provide annotations that tell you whether your case is still considered good law (i.e. up to date and relevant). These annotations indicate whether judges in other cases have Followed, Applied, Distinguished, etc the reasoning for the legal principle you are researching.
Note that you should always read the full text of the case to make up your own mind on whether a case is still good law. You will need to locate the full text of the case, however this may not always be provided as a link in the case citator. In this situation, you will need to check the legal abbreviation in the Monash Legal Abbreviations guide. For example, VSCA stands for Victorian Supreme Court of Appeal. You can then search for the full text case using the Monash Cases Library guide.
What else can you use in your research?
Case citators will list:
- litigation history
- any legislative provisions considered in the case
- related cases considered by the judges ("cases considered")
- subsequent cases that have considered your case ("cases considering")
- secondary sources, such as case notes and journal articles written about the case.
To analyse a case you will need secondary sources (eg journal articles) to expand your thinking about the impact of the case. As well as any journal articles listed in the case citators, databases such as AGIS Plus Text, HeinOnline, Lexis, and Westlaw can be very useful for this purpose. Further information can be found on the Library databases page.
Navigating this resource
You can navigate the pages in this resource by either clicking on the page links here or by clicking the navigation buttons below.