Welcome to eJudgements’ SA Online Law Reports

eJudgements is an independent publisher of South African Online Law Reports. We publish judgements of the South African Superior Court. We are not linked to the other commerical publishers who publish their own sets of law reports.

South Africa does not have an official set of law reports, meaning that there are several competing versions of the law reports. However, with the move to electronic technology, the Southern African Legal Information Institute (Saflii) has admirably been publishing judgements on behalf of many of the courts. Many of the courts also have their own websites were their judgements are made available (for example, the Constitutional Court, Supreme Court of Appeal, Labour Court).

Why the need for something more?

eJudgements is not an attempt to overburden an already overburdened (and convoluted) system of making judgements available to the public and to practitioners. What is being provided is a powerful search facility, which makes it easier to find relevant judgements from the huge volume of judgements being made available on a daily basis.

We do not produce headnotes for cases nor do we publish journals. What we do is to harnass the advantages of the electronic age.

The traditional law reports are based on the print model and also reliant on a team of editors to choose which judgements are ‘reportable’. This means that judgements not deemed ‘reportable’ are lost. This was necessary in a world where publishing was based on print, and both space and cost were limiting factors.

The electronic age removes the limitations of printed works. There is no limitation on space and the costs of making everything available are neglible. What can be done, however, is to add a powerful search facility with allows the user to decide what is relevant to them and what is applicable to the issue they are researching. The categorisation of a case a ‘reportable’ is less relevant when the end user can chose for themselves if the case is relevant.

A Google search including Saflii, or any of the other sites, will produce results, but they still need to be sifted and if the search criteria are not exact, they will miss what could be a crucial case.
We don’t have all the judgements, but then a comparison between Juta, Lexis and Saflii will show that there is no publisher or website in South Africa which does have access to all the judgements.


Homepage Recently Added Cases

Screenshots of our homepage.

Click here to see some more screenshots from the judgements’ database available to subscribers.

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See for yourself what we can do:

eJudgements’ South African Online Law Reports doesn’t only use the extremely powerful Sharepoint search functionality, but we are tagging cases to enable searches to be refined. Examples of refinements are subject matter, Court, even counsel who appeared in the case.

eJudgements’ South African Online Law Reports is cloud-based, so you are not tied to your desk. As long as you have an internet connection, you have access.