Sources
- Legislation comes from legislation.gov.uk, with amendments applied as published there, and is reproduced under the Open Government Licence v3.0. zoomLaw does not edit the enacted text.
- Judgments come from the public record, chiefly the National Archives’ Find Case Law service. Each case page links to the judgment it describes.
- Older authorities that are cited but not published online, such as cases known only by a law report reference, are listed under their report citation so that the judgments citing them can still be found together.
What zoomLaw adds to a judgment
Each judgment is analysed from its full text into a structured record. The case page is built from that record:
- a short summary, the key facts and what the court held;
- the legal points, or propositions, the judgment decides, each tied to the paragraphs where the court decides it;
- the cases and legislation it cites, matched to the right judgment or provision even where the citation in the judgment is incomplete or wrong;
- its appeal history: the decisions below it and above it in the same proceedings.
How later courts treated each point
When a later judgment refers to an earlier one, zoomLaw records which of the earlier case’s legal points it considered and how: whether it applied, approved, explained, distinguished or disapproved that point. One case can be approved on one point and doubted on another, so treatments are kept point by point, not as a single label for the whole case.
Every treatment shows the paragraphs relied on in both judgments, so you can read the passages for yourself. The “Treatment over time” and “Most often cited for” sections on each case page are built from these records.
Legislation and defined terms
Defined terms are marked in the text only where the definition applies. A term defined for one Part of an Act is marked in that Part and nowhere else, and definitions from a parent Act are carried into the statutory instruments made under it. Cases that consider a section are listed beside it, ranked by how much weight later courts have given them.
Rankings and selections
Lists on zoomLaw are calculated from the citation record, not chosen by hand.
- Most cited cases are ranked by the number of later judgments that cite them.
- Leading cases also weigh how later courts treated each case, how recently, and how senior those courts are, and group cases by the areas of law in which they are cited together.
- Key provisions are the sections that at least three judgments consider.
- The law firm pages count the cases in which a firm is named as acting in published judgments, and never use a case’s outcome. The About page explains how firms are labelled.
Checks
- Citations in each judgment are matched against zoomLaw’s index of judgments and law report references, correcting common errors in the way cases are cited. A reference that cannot be matched with confidence is shown by name rather than linked to the wrong case.
- Appeal links are matched using court case numbers and the decisions in each judgment, so a case page shows the right decisions above and below it.
- Case pages are rebuilt as new judgments arrive, so each treatment record includes the latest judgments citing the case.
- Corrections from readers are reviewed and fed back into the record. If something looks wrong, please tell us.
How often it is updated
- New judgments from the senior courts are added most nights, usually within a few days of hand-down.
- Legislation is rebuilt every week, picking up new Acts, new instruments and amendments.
Limits
zoomLaw covers judgments that are published, so decisions that are never published, and claims that settle, are not in the record. Coverage of older judgments is less complete than for recent ones. Summaries are a guide to a judgment, not a substitute for it. zoomLaw is a research tool, not legal advice: read the judgment or the enacted text before relying on it.