Electronic sources for legislation

This page discusses sources for current UK and EU legislation: legislation.gov.uk, Lexis Library, Westlaw and Eurlex. For a refresher on legislation, see Legislation in the Overview.

UK legislation

Lexis Library and Westlaw are the best sources for up-to-date consolidated or revised UK legislation, in which amendments have been incorporated into the original Act. The official legislation.gov.uk is in the process of revising all the legislation on its site. All three sources provide a pdf of an entire act (as amended), as well as each section of an Act as a separate document.

Lexis Library and Westlaw also provide extensive citator features for each section of legislation, including commencement dates, tables of amendments and related legislation; cases citing; and links to relevant secondary sources. Explanatory Notes - the document that accompanies the bill in parliament - are also provided for some Acts.

These citator features make Lexis Library and Westlaw powerful sources for researching legislation. The main advantage of consolidated legislation in print, which can be found in Halsbury's Statutes or in subject-specific publications, is that it is organised by subject. It is probably easier to find all legislation relating to education, for example, in a print volume than in a database. However, further investigation of that legislation, to find recent cases citing the legislation, commentary and current amendments, is better done in databases.

legislation.gov.uk is the official source of original and revised UK legislation, including legislation from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Always check the 'Changes to Legislation' message for each Act and section as not all legislation is up-to-date as yet.

Lexis Library:

• consolidated versions of UK Public General and Scottish Acts and Statutory Instruments
• citator features - amendments, related legislation, cases citing, relevant secondary sources (in Lexis Library, including Halsbury's Laws)
• annotations from Halsbury's Statutes
• historic versions email service
• bill tracker with links to parliament website.

Westlaw UK:

• consolidated versions of UK Public General and Scottish Acts and Statutory Instruments
• citator features - amendments, related legislation, cases citing, relevant secondary sources (in Westlaw)
• annotations for some Acts
• point-in-time and historic (back to 1991) and prospective versions of legislation
• current awareness service for bills with links to parliament website.

EU legislation

The Eurlex database provides all EU legislation and treaties. It can be searched by document name or number, or browsed by subject. Justis, Lexis Library and Westlaw all draw legislation from this database, and present it via EU search interfaces.

The Eurlex 'bibliographic notice' provides relevant information about amendments, national implementation and cases affected by legislation.