Law 

Legislation is made under authoritiy, granted by constituional right, to Parliaments.

Legislation is jurisdictionaly based and constitutionally defined:  A Parliament only has the right to make laws for the people it governs and within the llimits of the Constitution.

In Force: Not all legislation passed by Parliament which has received assent is necessarily immediately in force. Check the Act, or the interpretation acts for the jurisdiction to see the rules relating to an Acts operation. 
Read more: Guide to Legal Research- Legislation.
Murdoch law students can also go through the Tutorials,and self test questions on the Law Community Page (My Units).

Statute Law  Information from the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library "about the drafting of bills and their passage through federal Parliament, delegated legislation and the process of Parliamentary scrutiny; and statutory interpretation."

Case Law is often referred to as judge-made law that interprets prior case law, statutes and other legal authority.

Law Reports are the reported decisions of the courts, however, not all decisions are reported.  Individual decisions are chosen to be published on the grounds of their precedent value.

Authorised Reports are the official law reports reviewed by the Judges prior to publication: see Authorised Reports

Other jurisdictional or subject reports do not go through the lengthy review process by the courts. They are usually produced by commercial publishers and appear in print more quickly than authorised report series.

For example: decisions of the High Court of Australia are reported in the Commonwealth Law Reports, the Australian Law Journal Reports and the Australian Law Reports.  However, only the CLRs are the authorised reports and are the preferred reports to cite.

Unreported Judgments are decisions of courts that have not been published in law reports.  All decisions begin as an unreported judgment, only a small proportion of decisions are selected for reporting. 
Unreported judgments are available on the court judgments page, or AustLII very quickly.

Media Neutral citations:  Since the mid-1990s most courts give their unreported decisions a citation which consists of the year, the court designation and a number, and each paragraph in the decision is numbered. This citation format is called Medium Neutral which means that the paragraph numbers are included in both the print format (medium) or the online (medium) format.  See Medium Neutral Citation  for court designations and citaton formats.

Read Murdoch's Guide to Legal Research for more information about Case Law.