Halsbury's Laws of England online

Halsbury's Laws is an authoritative encyclopaedia of law in the England and Wales, arranged by subject,with several indexes and updating services. It is particularly useful if you are researching a new area of law (perhaps for a moot) and need to find the most important cases, legislation and commentary in that area.

For more information about Halsbury's Laws, go to Printed Resources . This page gives advice about searching Halsbury’s Laws Online, which is in Lexis.

Halbury's Laws is in the LexisLibrary Commentary database. Depending on how you have LexisLibrary set up, you can find in several ways.

1. Use 'Find a Source' on the LexisLibrary front page (include the apostrophe), and add it to your favortites. It will appear under Commentary.

2. Browse to Commentary alond the top menu bar, then choose Halsbury’s Laws from the drop-down list of sources.

3. Find Halsbury's Laws in your 'My Library' list, or add it to the list.

Selecting Halsbury's Laws in Sources

Browsing Halsbury’s Laws

 

1. Click on the Browse link, on the left of the Halsbury’s Laws search page to see the encyclopedia in ‘book’ form.

2. Click on the + signs to ‘open’ a volume.

3. To search single volumes or sections, put a tick next to the relevant heading and use the Quick Find or return to the search screen by clicking on 'Search' on the top left.

 

Halsbury's Laws Online, showing table of contents for Administration Volume

 
   

Searching Halsbury's Laws

  

1. Consider using Browse to select a volume to search before beginning. In this screen shot, the Administrative Law volume was selected via Browse.

2. Open 'Show options to search specific document sections' which will allow you to do a field search.

3. Use Boolean terms and connectors or try searching in the Headings field.

 

Halsbury's Laws search screen

 

 
   

Results screen features

 

1. Paragraph headings are shown in the Title column. The ‘Location’ column on the right of the screen, shows the volume and part from which the paragraph is drawn. The following functions may help with your search:

  • set Show to Expanded List, to show the words around your search term
  • look at the search returns from a specific volume (or part) by selecting it from the left hand menu
  • set Sort Order to Relevance instead of Source, and or
  • use Search within results to refine your search.

 

Halsbury's Laws results page - search for habeas corpus

Updates

If there are updates, you will see a separate link below the section of text. The Update appears at the bottom of the page after the footnotes. Unlike current online legislation, the updates are not incorporated into the main text.


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page updated on 17 February 2011 at 15:46

                               

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