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Detailed / Database search

This type of search is shown on the central search page when searching for Judgments / Practice Directions. Use this search to search specific database fields in a particular section (e.g. the Reference Number field in the Practice Directions section).

To search for court judgments and to see further options select either the Unreported Judgments or Jersey Law Reports tick boxes or for a combined search select both boxes. To search for court judgments enter or select search criteria as required. It is also possible to do a free text search of Judgments only by entering a word or phrase in the Text box and selecting Text Search. If you specifically want to perform a free text search across the whole site or search for a practice direction, select the appropriate tab for additional search options.

  • All search criteria selected or entered in each field are read as "AND" statements, i.e. to bring back a search result the document must match the specified search criteria in ALL fields, e.g. if I select the "Unreported Judgments" section and enter "Smith" in the Parties field and set the date range from 1st January 2006 to 31st January 2006, a search result will only be returned if there is an Unreported Judgment in January 2006 where Smith is one of the Parties.
  • To broaden your search, select or enter data in one or two search fields only.
  • To search by Reference Number, you must enter the correct format for the Reference Number in the search field. The correct formats for the different sections are as per the list below. Please note that in all cases "N" refers to a number which can be any number of digits (please note that you should not enter zeros before a number, e.g. you should enter 2000/3 rather than 2000/003):
    • Unreported Judgments (prior to 1st Jan 2003) YYYY/N e.g. 2000/191 or 2001/14
    • Unreported Judgments (after 1st Jan 2003) [YYYY]XXXNNN where XXX is one of the following, JRC – Jersey Royal Court, JCA – Jersey Court of Appeal, JPC – Privy Council. E.g. [2004]JPC040, [207]JRC102
    • Practice Directions XX YY/NN where XX is one of the following RC – Royal Court, FD – Family Division, LA – Licensing Assembly, CA – Court of Appeal e.g. CA 05/01, RC 05/27
  • Practice Direction – Category. By using selecting an entry from the drop down list displayed will enable you to display practice direction within the selected category only.
  • Date ranges can be entered by selecting a ‘from’ and ‘to’ date, either entering the date manually or using the Calendar button to find a date. Briefly, when the initial calendar is displayed it will show the current month, the arrows can be used to select next or previous months. By clicking on the month header e.g. September 2007, will then display the 12 months for the year, and you can then step to next and previous years by using the arrows. Finally, by selecting on the Year header e.g. 2007 will then display a 10 year range which can be further navigated using the arrows.
  • By default the date range is set from first date on record to the current date.
  • Parties – Exact match search facility. The normal search will find any results where the text entered is contained within the Parties field e.g. entering Smit will return results for Smith, Whitesmith etc. Therefore the use of exact match will be highly valuable if searching for parties identified single initials. So entering “A” within the parties field and ticking the exact match box will return results such as S v A, A v C, etc.

Free-Text Search

Use this search to search the full-text of all documents and content across the whole website, or a particular section. You can enter a single word, or use the tips below to refine your search to find more specific results.

Once your results are displayed it will be possible to refine them further to specific areas of the site as required.

  • Try to use discriminating terms that are likely to be found only in the documents you seek.
  • The more words you give, the better results you'll get.
  • Search by typing words and phrases.
adoption law

This will find documents containing as many of these words and phrases as possible, ranked so that the documents most relevant to your query are presented first. Don't worry about missing a document because it doesn't have one of the words in your search -- searching returns relevant results even if they don't contain all query terms.

  • Identify phrases with quotation marks, separated with commas.
adoption law "law reports", "foreign adoption"

A phrase is entered using double quotation marks, and only matches those words which appear adjacent to each other. Separate multiple phrases or proper names with a comma.

  • Use UPPER case to indicate exact match.
Bailiff's Chambers, NeXT

Search terms in lowercase will match words in any case, otherwise, an exact case match is used. For example, next will find matches for Next, next, and NeXT, whereas a query for NeXT will only match NeXT.

  • Requiring or Excluding Terms.
vehicle law -motorcycle +car

You can use the + and - signs to specify terms which must be included or which must not be included in search results. You can use this technique in conjunction with phrases and case matching.

Page last updated 18 Aug 2008
 
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