2011/8/3 Ben Campbell <[email protected]>: > As part of a little experiment into tracking down sources of news articles, > I was wondering if there was any good way to track down information about UK > court cases? > > In my hopelessly naive idealised view of the world, each court case would > have a nice, permanent, URL on a .gov.uk site somewhere which pulled > together all the public information pertaining to that case - title, > participants, schedules, name of court, transcripts (are they public?), > whatever... > And obviously it'd be a simple matter of typing a few relevant keywords into > a search engine to find said URL.
You've already had a considerable amount of information on the subject, so I what I say will (I hope) build on what has already been said. First, essentially all civil courts and tribunals (I think this holds true for criminal courts as well) create court-specific unique ID's for whatever the unit of case-initiation might be - in mainstream civil courts this will usually be a "claim", but cases may be started in other ways and in other places. For example, if you make a claim in (say) Guildford County Court, you fill in a claim form and the court will stamp it with a claim number when they issue it (eg 09P00544). The court or tribunal then maintains - I think always with at least some computer assistance nowadays, but there may still be paper hold-outs though I doubt it) - a "file" for that claim which includes all the various transactions associated with it. A case I am waiting for a judgment on (because one of my own depends on it) is Kernott v Jones in the Supreme Court of the UK. The Supreme Court (because it runs its own computer system and therefore can be relatively sane about these things) tries to make as much of the transaction meta data available as it can, see here: http://www.supremecourt.gov.uk/current-cases/CCCaseDetails/case_2010_0130.html >From which I know that it was heard on 4 May but there is (yet) no decided handing down date (i.e. when the judgment is released). Since we are in a legal vacation it may be a while and my client may get twitchy. However, at least I know that. I don't think any other court or tribunal in the UK is as transparent as this, but clearly its an invaluable resource. There seems (to me) to be a culture of avoiding proper openness and transparency in the court service or at least one of behaving very oddly in connection with it. The court service - now HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) does not run the supreme court's system, but is slowly taking over all other courts and tribunals. One day there may be a unified system but don't hold your breath. HMCTS is slowly "owning" tribunals, having taken over magistrates' courts and other semi-independent parts of the judicial system. XHIBIT - by the way - which another person posted deals essentially with Crown Court (and therefore almost certainly criminal) cases. Now often the reason the file isn't expose in the above fashion is because it was beyond the expertise of the organisation that is running the system to work out how to do it. Ironically my response today is late partly because I was out of town as part of my induction as a tribunal chair in the Residential Property Tribunal Service. The RPTS is merging into HMCTS as we speak, but always ran its own system. There is some metadata. It isn't exposed. It would be nice if it was. It isn't exposed simply because RPTS doesn't have the internal expertise to really sort that out (they do pretty well on decision though). Now, the metadata is great, but you'd really like to see all the papers that were/are filed. That's mostly not possible because they are *papers*, but even where they are electronic, the court service has decided to make it difficult (and requires the payment of a fee) to get the relevant documents out of them if you are a non-party. This is something I'd like to see reformed (along with everything else). The when of a hearing goes like this: courts vary in how they "list" cases to be heard. Often an order will be made that a case be listed for "the first open date after <date>". The listing office of the court will then by some bureaucratic process come up with a date. The case will then appear on the list for that date, the parties will turn up and then hope to get their time in court, but fixtures are like doctor's appointments, which is why the cause lists say things like "Not Before half-past 10". Sometimes the organisation is more (or less) scientific. Employment tribunals will often set dates for future hearings by having parties negotiate dates to avoid with the listing office (which the judge has on the phone), sometimes lists of dates to avoid are sent back and forth. Blissfully, chancery masters can pull up their own diary and list hearings for future dates in the diary while the parties are there. Etc, etc. Courtel makes available some of this information in a not particularly useful form. But, as far as I can see it has information you have to pay for that it was given exclusively (and at no cost) by HMCTS. It has also been my experience that courts are less willing to tell you listing information than they were over the phone (driving income to Courtel, or denying people information they used to be able to obtain). The output of a claim etc _may_ be one or more decisions (or "judgments" in the case of courts). In some tribunals these must be in writing. In courts they generally need not be in writing but often are. There is no real consistency as to what judgments are published and how. RPTS puts *all* written decisions on its website (which has now been absorbed into .gov somewhere but they are still all there). Employment tribunals send all written decisions to some warehouse somewhere from which they can be obtained for a fee (say £5 each - I'm not sure). Courts used to sporadically make their written decisions available on the web, then bailii appeared and rather cornered the market (its funded by HMCTS plus some legal firms etc). My views on bailii-as-obstacle are I think well known so I won't bore here. Judgments are what lay people think of as "cases". A single claim may create numerous judgments and vice versa (since claims can be conjoined) so there's a many-many relationship between the unique ID I mentioned earlier and the judgment itself. Early this century the courts started giving most judgments (at least in the senior courts) a unique ID as well, known as a "neutral citation number". In the case I mentioned earlier (Kernott v Jones) this was [2010] EWCA Civ 578 when it was in the court of appeal. These are unique to the judgment but are relatively new. Any pre-21st century cases won't have them (though bailii has been making them up). Historically there might only be a "report" of a judgment not a judgment itself (sometimes several people scribble down what they think the judge says, so each report might be different - in later times the judge produced something in writing which could be made into a report, so reports became more uniform). These reports were privately produced and have their own citations. http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2010/578.html gives some examples. There's a lot to say about this, so I won't say any more to avoid an overly long response. Civil courts are supposed to record proceedings - even county courts are supposed to - and one often has to pause while the judge changes the tape in the recorder in a small claims hearing. Tapes are stored and can be requested for transcription. Transcriptions are not ordinarily made unless requested (and paid for) usually by a party for an appeal. Some tribunals do not record (none of the RPTS) some only record the judgment (eg Employment Tribunals) and the rest is left to the handwritten notes of the parties or anyone else present. Don't hesitate to ask more and I'm happy for you to do so offline. -- Francis Davey _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
