Tuesday 17 July 2012

Public and Administrative law - latest cases

@ukpubliclaw

Why a new Twitter feed of caselaw from Bailii? There is already @bailii, which is doing an excellent job, and @caselawupdates. The @bailii feed grabs everything that goes on Bailii, and even adds a short descriptor to the front of the Tweet so you can see at a glance the court. However, it is still quite easy to overlook a case from a particular speciality – 14 new cases so far on the day I'm writing this.

I'm involved in research into the impact and value of judicial review, so it is natural to want a straightforward alert system of new judgments from the Administrative Court. The Admin Court deals with more than civil judicial review, but with a likely output of between 30 and 60 new cases each month the numbers are much more manageable.

Fortunately it is straightforward to obtain these cases on their own because Bailii has multiple different feeds to choose from. @ukpubliclaw only pulls cases from the "new decisions" Admin Court feed on Bailii – see the choices of feeds here, (there's loads).

Appeals are slightly more difficult. Bailii has separate feeds for Civil and Criminal appeals, but  most civil appeals are not from the Admin Court. And while a good proportion of Supreme Court cases are on appeal from judicial review decisions, it isn't obvious how to distinguish them from the rss feed.

I am experimenting with a filtered feed from the Court of Appeal, on the basis that most judicial review cases have the phrase "(On the application" included in their title field. In the meantime, I will be updating the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court decisions manually, and be trying to follow a format similar to this one here.

Anyway I hope this feed grows to perform a useful service for students and practitioners alike. I can see it expanding to include tweets linking casenotes for example, or media reports of cases, depending on how much time I have and how people are inspired to engage.

If you have any ideas, feel free to DM the @ukpubliclaw feed, or leave a comment here.

Many thanks to Patrick Torsney, @ilegal, for his help and encouragement. (Patrick administers the @bailii feed.)

@crluff