references to see how these texts have been deployed by the judges in their
reasoning.
(5)
They are doing socio legal research on a particular judge and wish to
view instances in judgments where their name is mentioned.
There are four devices for delving in a case for information. (i) The reader can
just scan the text. (ii) Some information in a case is stored in, or accessed
from, specific parts of the case, for example from the catchwords, head note,
summary of arguments, footnotes, or the list of cases cited. (iii) The text of the
case may have dedicated research tools or finding aids. Ideally, any legal text,
including a report of a case should contain tables of cases, legislation and
other sources. With cases it is more common that these tables are not
prepared for individual cases. Instead they are prepared for a published
volume of cases.
Periodically the publishers consolidate these tables and
publish them separately for the entire law report as it is on the date when the
consolidation is made. (iv) Where the case is electronically stored one can use
the search function. However, to use this tool it is necessary to know or guess
an appropriate word or phrase to search. This is simple when searching for the
name of a judge or author, but is far less appropriate in other cases, for
example
when one is searching for references to legislations that may have
been made on a topic.
Poring
Introduction
Poring over a case and reading it carefully is usually performed to extract the
ratio decidendi from the
case. Reading cases, however, is often haphazard
because in Australia at least, the reasoning is difficult to follow. This is really a
symptom of another problem, namely that there is uniform method for
reasoning to decide a case. Indeed it is difficult to find any statement of a
coherent method at all.
780
Until this problem is rectified, reading cases will
always be a chancy business. However, we can address this problem by
utilising the view of precedent and case law presented in earlier chapters
781
and
demonstrating how this can be adapted to guide lawyers in reading cases.
Nature of Precedent
Precedent is a predictor. Essentially lawyers read a case to extract the ratio. They
wish
to
use
the
ratio of the case to predict how the court will decide a case in the
surname and title of a textbook or the author and citation of article while omitting
its title.
780
Christopher Enright Legal Reasoning
781
Chapter 7 Common Law Rules, Chapter 10 Classifying Meanings (which
examines some types of ambiguity that are peculiar to judge made law and make
it flexible), Chapter 12 Policy and Chapter 13 Precedent.
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