Scottish Council of Law Reporting makes more cases available

Readers of Scottish Legal News may be interested to learn of some work by the Scottish Council of Law Reporting to make important historic (but still cited) Scottish law reports available as widely as possible. As a result BAILII has now loaded the reports gathered in Morison’s Dictionary (together with Brown’s Supplement), plus Hailes and Elchies law reports. These are accessible now on open access through their site at http://www.bailii.org/scot/cases/HSLR.html

The Council has also completed the data capture (both in PDF and xml) of the Scottish Appeal Cases (mostly civil appeals to the House of Lords from 1707 to 1873) and Jury Court Reports (1815-1830). BAILII are planning to load this material over the next few months. Some of these reports are extremely rare in hard copy.

In pursuit of its objective of improving access to these materials, the SCLR has also offered the data, free of charge, to the commercial legal information vendors. Westlaw are the first to have uploaded the Morison etc. cases in their entirety and these reports are now available to Westlaw subscribers. William S Hein have also included some additional Morison material and it is hoped that Justis will include these reports in their service soon.

The Scottish Council of Law Reporting is a charity, established by the Scottish legal profession whose main purpose is the publication of Session Cases, the ‘official’ law reports of the Scottish Courts. On its website at www.scottishlawreports.org.uk visitors can find a wealth of useful information including some very helpful Links and Online Resources, and links to a series of films explaining the role of law reports and precedent to legal novices.