Law: Practical Legal Research

Halsbury's Laws of England is available online via the Lexis Library database and covers the whole spectrum of English law. It is designed to enable practitioners to answer the full range of questions likely to arise in the course of their work. It provides a comprehensive narrative statement of the law of England and Wales and is written by or in conjunction with leading lawyers, both practitioners and academics.

Available online via Lexis Library. Comprehensive source of precedents for (non-litigating) solicitors. It contains around 15,000 forms and precedents (including those for sale of land, landlord and tenant, commercial law, wills and trusts, family law).

Legislation.gov.uk carries most (but not all) types of legislation and their accompanying explanatory documents. The site holds all primary legislation from 1988 to the present day and most pre-1988 primary legislation. It also holds secondary legislation from 1987, including UK Statutory Instruments, although these are only as enacted.

BAILII provides access to the most comprehensive set of British and Irish primary legal materials that are available for free and in one place on the internet. For information on which judgements are added to the database see www.bailii.org/bailii/summary-cases.html

This database allows you to search for the meaning of abbreviations for English language legal publications or search a publication title to find the approved abbreviation.

UK Parliament webpage that sets out the proposals for new laws, and plans to change existing laws, that are presented for debate before Parliament.

The Official Report (Hansard) is the edited report of proceedings of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords.