All England Commercial Cases, Law Reports added to our library collection

Rahman’s Chambers is delighted to announce that it added All England Commercial Cases, Law Reports to its library collections. This extremely important publication of LexisNexis will significantly help improving the quality of our legal research.

All England Commercial Cases Volume Set 1999 All England Commercial Cases Volume Set 1999 to date publishes House of Lords, Privy Council, Court of Appeal, High Court and all other areas of commercial law published by LexisNexis, Buttherworths.

Cases are presented with catchwords and head-notes summarizing the judgments with clarity and accuracy in the long-established All England law Reports style. Cross-references are given to other major legal works such as Halsbury’s Laws and Halsbury’s Statutes.

Proofs of all High Court and Court of Appeal judgments reported are approved by the appropriate judges before publication.

The value of law reports in legal profession cannot be over emphasized. The decision of the superior courts, the ratio decidendi, reported in the law reports provides easy accessible precedent in subsequent cases of similar or identical facts. This makes it possible to predict how cases will go in courts.

Law reports are the engine room of legal development. They present the state of the law and not what law ought to be as shown in journals.

Online research tools do contribute significantly to improving productivity and managing costs. Research shows that lawyers can complete tasks three times faster using digital research platforms than hard copy materials. However, it doesn’t always return reliable or accurate legal research. Many electronic documents are fleeting, ephemeral. They can disappear entirely or suffer from the lesser defect of link rot. Printed materials carry a greater guarantee of permanence.

Once purchased, print materials belong to a library. A library has access to licensed contents only so long as it maintains and pays for a subscription. This distinction plays a significant role in the analysis of the long-term value of a resource to a library.

Law libraries, which had long relied upon the steady pricing and stable databases of LexisNexis and Westlaw, were suddenly faced with substantial bills for electronic resources that were previously available at no additional charge.

Presently, print and e-formats each have exclusive values, and until those values can be replicated in other media, both formats must be collected, maintained, and supported by libraries.

Standard 606 of the American Bar Association’s Standards for Approval of Law Schools clearly recognizes the importance of multi format libraries by requiring that academic law library collections provide access to both tangible materials and electronic information.

Bibliography

  • Why Print and Electronic Resources Are Essential to the Academic Law Library by Michelle M. Wu, Georgetown University Law Center
  • Law Reports Exploitation in a Law Library: The Case of University of Benin Faculty of Law Library, Emmanuel Owushi University of Port Harcour, Port Harcourt, Nigeria
  • LexisNexis, Buttherworths

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