Extracts from important judgments

You have seen a citation like AIR 1978 SC 597 printed under a case name and skipped straight past it to the facts. That string of letters and numbers is not decoration — it is an address. It tells you which reporter published the case, in which year, and where exactly to find it, the way a PIN code tells a postman which street to walk down. Learn to read one properly, and every case you meet for the next five years stops being a wall of text and starts being a document you can navigate.

In two minutes

A case citation is a coded address — case name, year, volume or reporter abbreviation, page or serial number, and court — and reading a judgment extract properly means being able to identify each of these along with its head note, the judges who sat, and the statutes or provisions it applies.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Legal Language and Writing on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.