Basic Westlaw Training

What is Westlaw?

• Westlaw is a vast but easily searchable online database of case law, legislation, legal journals, commentary and EU and international materials.

• Many of these documents are full text. • This makes it an extremely valuable resource

which will be essential to your study here.

Accessing the Westlaw Database

• Go to www.swan.ac.uk • Click on Current Students to go to MyUni page.• Log in using your Swansea Login and click on

iFind.• In the iFind Discover box, type in Westlaw and

click on Find.• This will take you to the record. Click on access

this resource and then on Swansea University.

Finding Case Law on Westlaw

• Click on Cases at the top of the page• Search for the case using Free Text, Party

Names or Citation.• To search using Free Text, type in the search

term(s) in Free Text box. This searches through entire document for the search term.

• When searching for a phrase enclose it in quotations marks, such as “air pollution”.

Case Law (cont)

• If there are too many hits, you can limit it to a particular topic or date by clicking on the left hand side of the page.

Searching by Party Names

• Parties means the two sides involved in a case. • Parties can be individuals, companies, local

government or organisations. • The names of the parties are separated by “v”.• If one of the parties is the government, it is

written as “R”. (R stands for for Regina or Rex).• For example R v Nicholas Adam Lund.

Searching by Party Names

• Basic rule when searching is Keep it Simple don’t put in anymore information than you need to.

• Type in one or both names into the Party Names search box.

• Word of warning – Westlaw will not automatically correct misspellings.

• If a word is misspelt it will not find the record.

Understanding the “Hits”

• Type in Bocardo SA v Star Energy UK Onshore Ltd.• “Where Reported” field is the law series or

journal the case has been reported in.• “Documents” means the documents which

Westlaw has access to.• “Official transcript” is the original document

which was produced by the court.• You can click on the titles blue to take you to a

full text version of that case.

Understanding “Hits” cont.

• All cases have a case analysis which is a summary of the case, and give you cases or legislation citing this case or other cases where this case is cited.

Traffic Light System for Cases

• means good (positive) or neutral treatment. The ruling was up held in any subsequent cases. It is a good law. Green means go.

means that it has been given negative treatment and that at least one section of the law has been subsequently overruled. Red means a bad law - don’t use it.• means that there is an appeal for this case going through

the Court of Appeal, Civil Division or the Supreme Court • means

Searching for a Journal Article

• Click on Journals at the top of the page.• Type in search terms in Free Text, Article Title

or Author field. • When searching for a phrase in the Free Text

field, remember to use quotation marks.• Try searching for an article called

Searching for Legislation

• Legislation includes Acts of Parliament and Statutory Instruments.

• If you know the title of the Act you can enter the title in the Act/SI title field.

• Try typing in Carriage of Goods by Sea Act 1971 and search.

• Clicking on Arrangement of Act will bring up the different sections which you can then click on.

Searching for Legislation

• The sections which are still in force will have a green tick next to them.

• To get a pdf version, click on the icon at the right hand side of the page.

Printing, Downloading and E-mailing Documents

• Cases, journal articles and legislation can be printed, downloaded or e-mailed by opening the document and clicking on the envelope icon at the top of the page.

• To print a section or sections of the document click on the box next to the section you want to print, download or e-mail before clicking on the envelope icon.