Council of Law Reporting Act 1969


Competition Policy Review Report - Option 3


Option 3 - The Court would provide judgments to publishers, who would control publication of the authorised reports.

Those in favour of this option argued:

• The traditional concept of “authorised reports” has ceased to be of utility and is itself a restriction on competition;
• It is the proper role of legal publishers to add value to the materials they publish by making decisions concerning the selectivity of the judgements published, and by adding editorial enhancements such as headnotes;
• Competition between legal publishers in the quality of their selection and editorial processes will prevent over-reporting, maintain quality in relation to value-added features, and is likely to protect the public interest better than an unrepresentative body such as the Council;
• The quality of what is published is regulated by the fact that the courts are now publishing their “raw” decisions in a far more complete, consistent and reliable form because of the immediacy of electronic publishing of their decisions; and
• The argument that an authorised series is necessary to assist legal research is no longer valid because a great deal of research is probably done electronically. Electronic publishing enables material to be searched according to relevance and by electronic links.