Scottish Law Reporter now accessible on BAILII

As well as a source of material for practicing lawyers they form a huge body of material of interest to legal academics and social historians.

The most recent phase of the project has been the digitisation of the Scottish Law Reporter reports. Some 15,000 cases were reported in the Scottish Law Reporter (SLR) during its period of publication from 1865 to 1924. The reports cover all the Scottish courts from the Sheriff Court upward and many of the cases reported do not appear in other series.

BAILII (the British and Irish Legal Information Institute) has now begun to make the SLR materials available for open access on its website, commencing with the SLR’s House of Lords reports. These may now be found at “SCOTTISH_SLR_House_of_Lords”.

Where cases have been reported in other series, BAILII is providing cross-referencing. These law reports, together with those to be found in Morison’s Dictionary and other series that have been digitised by the council over the past few years and are now accessible via BAILII, are as complete a collection of law reports of historic Scottish cases as may be found.

As such they are a valuable supplement to the council’s contemporary reporting of Scottish cases to be found in Session Cases®, which series now includes law reports of cases heard by the Sheriff Appeal Court (Civil and Criminal).