National Competition Policy Review Discussion Paper


Council of Law Reporting Act 1969


8. The Role of Law Reports and Competition

Authorised reports are a primary source of law for members of the judiciary, legal practitioners, legal researchers, teachers and students of law in this State and elsewhere. As such, they are a crucial resource for the law libraries of legal institutions servicing these groups. This would include the courts, universities and other tertiary institutions, law firms, government departments, and non-government organisations providing legal services to members of the public. The NSWLR are also a general source of information about the operation of the law for other interested parties.

In circumstances where a case has been published in more than one series of law reports, it is the policy of the courts to require the citation of cases from the authorised reports in preference to any other series. This policy is not officially recognised in the court rules or practice notes issued by the courts, but is long standing accepted practice.

The market for specialised series is similar to that for authorised reports. However, the market would be more confined, for example, specialised reports would tend to serve a smaller niche market for lawyers in specialist practices.

The Council’s Role and Competition

Since 1971, the Council of Law Reporting has had an arrangement in place with a single publisher for the publication of the printed version of the authorised New South Wales Law Reports. The NSWLR is also currently published electronically under a non-exclusive licensing agreement.

In 1998 the Council decided to establish and maintain an electronic form of the NSWLR marked up to the Council’s SGML DTDs.¹⁸ It is intended that the electronic form is to be an additional authoritative source of the NSWLR and that the Council will license others to publish parts, or all of the NSWLR in various electronic forms. This project, which is designed to provide high quality electronic NSWLR to licensees, is near completion and the electronic form will be available for marketing in late 1999.

As previously noted, the Act provides that the Council may prepare, publish and sell or arrange for the preparation, publication and sale of reports of judicial decisions.¹⁹ The Act does not specify that the Council has a monopoly on the publication of authorised reports in NSW. However, it might be argued that, by enabling the Council to have sole control of the publication arrangements with respect to the authorised reports, the Act potentially restricts the free market for the publication of authorised law reports in New South Wales.

Whether such a restriction currently exists in real terms depends upon factors such as the size of the market and the viability of maintaining more than one series of published reports.

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¹⁸ SGML stands for Standard Generalised Mark-up Language, which is a database language. DTD is document type defintion, which follows the rules of SGML specification that accompanies documents and identifies codes or mark-up for documents for processing purposes.
¹⁹ s.7(1) Council of Law Reporting Act 1969


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