Don't Forget!!
Read this guide in conjunction with the Australian Guide to Legal Citation.
Legal Abbreviations
Case law and journal citations are made up of the abbreviation for the case report series or journal.
To find the unabbreviated case report series or journal title you can look at a number of different sources:
Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations
Raistrick's Index to Legal Citations and Abbreviations
Thomson Reuters' Firstpoint Table of Abbreviations
The Australian Guide to Legal Citation (ALGC) Referencing Guide
The La Trobe University Legal Abbreviations Database
When in CaseBase in Lexis Advance you can access an Abbreviation/Subject List from the help menu.
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Reading Case Citations
How to read a Case Citation
Students studying law are required to develop understanding and confidence reading case citations.
The following citation, taken from CaseBase on Lexis Advance, shows the different parts of an example case citation and what the abbreviations mean.
What does the series abbreviation mean?
The initial citation task is to identify where the case has been reported.
Library catalogues generally use the full series title which means you need to be able to use the appropriate tools to find what the abbreviation means.
The two main tools used to assist you with finding out the name of a case law series or legal journal series are:
- Cardiff University, Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations. This should answer the majority of your abbreviation questions.
- Raistrick, Donald, Index to Legal Citations and Abbreviations (3rd ed, London: Sweet & Maxwell, 2008). This is generally referred to as Raistrick's. A copy of this Index is shelved in the Law Library Reference collection at 340.0148 RAI 2008.
Other citation indexes are shelved at the same number in the Reference collection in Level 3 and are listed to the left of this text box.
Once you have found the unabbreviated name of the report series, you can enter this into Library Search.
This will give you a listing of the Library's holdings of the series, including whether it is available in print, electronically, or both.
