Wikiversity Law Reports

Wikiversity Law Reports are freely-licensed headnotes for court decisions.

They should provide useful information for students and lawyers, ideally making commercial law reports and citators redundant, without unnecessarily duplicating freely-available resources such as Austlii.

Each report performs the same function as the headnote in a law report and consists of:

• Title: the name of the case and its citation in the relevant series of official law reports
  • e.g. Commissioner of Taxation v Anstis (2010) 241 CLR 443
• TL;DR: a one-sentence summary of what the case is known for, suitable for putting in parenthesis after a reference to the case
  • e.g. self-education expenses are deductible where the course of education is a condition of receiving an assessable government payment such as Youth Allowance
• Court and names of judges
• Facts: summary of the material facts
• Held: the main findings of fact or law of the court (specifying which judges, if not all, agreed with which propositions)
• (optional) Arguments: summary of the arguments of the parties before the court
• Debate: optionally, a summary of any divergent or controversial views on the meaning of the case
  • e.g. if there is debate over whether a particular holding in a case was ratio or obiter, or over how far a particular proposition goes, then this can be noted in this section.
  • This section should aggressively summarise, not reproduce, people's views. It should include hyperlinks to other pages that contain more details. The purpose of this section is to inform students about the existence of views and let them find out more elsewhere, not to promote one or another or to settle the debate.
• Other publishers' references: list of citations, including official, unofficial and medium-neutral citations
  • Where possible, these references should be hyperlinks to the reports themselves. This is often impossible for commercial reports, but is feasible for the versions published on websites like Austlii.
  • Wikiversity Law Reports do not contain the text of the decision.

As the reports are written, this structure will evolve.

• Wikiversity Law Reports/Gramophone Co v Shanti Films
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Civic Chandran v Ammini Amma
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Sentenza Corte Costituzionale n. 120/2014 (Insindacabilità Interna Corporis Acta)
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Sweeney v Boylan Nominees
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Ace Insurance v Trifunovski
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Yanner v Eaton
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Adams v Lindsell
• South African Law/Cession/Case law
• New Zealand Law/System/Baigents Case
• New Zealand Law/System/Huakina Development Trust v Waikato Valley Authority
• New Zealand Law/System/R v Shaheed (2002)
• New Zealand Law/System/Tavita v Minister of Immigration
• New Zealand Law/System/Transport Ministry v Payn
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Alcock v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire
• New Zealand Law/System/Hoani Te Heu Heu Tukino v Aotea District Maori Land Board
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Donoghue v Stevenson
• Wikiversity Law Reports/CPT Custodian v Commissioner of State Revenue
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Commissioner of Taxation v Anstis
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Charles v Commissioner of Taxation
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Co
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Adams v Tax Agents' Board
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Salomon v Salomon
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Grove v Flavel
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Perpetual Executors and Trustees v Russell
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Pirie v Saunders
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Take Harvest Ltd v George H Liu
• Wikiversity Law Reports/Waltons Stores v Maher

Please add ideas to this section.

• Reports could include catchwords. Each set of catchwords consists of a series of topics separated by dashes, progressing from general to specific, the last of which is an issue for the court to resolve, along with the answer.
  • e.g. income tax (Commonwealth of Australia) - general deductions - self-education expenses - course of study a requirement for receiving assessable government allowance - whether incurred in gaining or producing assessable income - yes