Find information about court cases, including law reports, judgments, newspaper articles, police records and commentaries.
Legal encyclopedias summarise the Commonwealth, state and local laws relating to a particular topic, including major cases which changed the way the laws were interpreted. Examples of topics covered include:
Printed legal encyclopedias are kept up-to-date by the addition of looseleaf inserts.
Cases may be discussed or analysed in journals, magazines and books.
Books on specific aspects of law or types of cases (for example, immigration law, rural law, business law) can be found using the Library's catalogue. Try including the keywords cases or commentary in your search for more relevant results.
If you have a reference to a specific journal, you can find out if the library has electronic or print copies using eJournals & Newspapers. See 'Finding full text articles', right, for more information.
The following indexes help you find relevant commentary in both books and journals:
Staff at the State Library of Victoria do not offer legal advice. Every effort is made to provide up to date, accurate and relevant legal information but this is not intended to replace qualified legal advice.
This guide includes information about finding legal advice.
Article citations can be found in many legal publications. These citations tell you which publication (journal or law report series) you can find an article in.
Some online citations link to the full text of the article, making it easy to find and read the full text.
If an online citation does not link to a full text article, use the Library's Journal search to find out if the publication that the article was published in is available electronically in another database. (Don't forget to check if the electronic copies of the publication include the date when your article was published). If the publication is not available electronically, check the Library's catalogue to find out if it is available in print at the Library.
Sometimes citations abbreviate the names of the journals or reports that articles and commentary can be found in. Monash University Library's Abbreviations of legal publications lists and deciphers commonly-used citations.
If you are having difficulty understanding a citation, or finding an article, please ask us for assistance.
