Case law: legal citations and abbreviations
A typical case reference, or citation, might look something like this:
Fisher v Bell [1961] 1 QB 394
Fisher and Bell are the names of the parties contesting the trial. Next you have the year that the case was reported, and the volume number of the report. Series of case reports are usually known by an abbreviation, so if you don't know what the abbreviation means, you will need to look it up.
The most useful index is probably the Index to Legal Abbreviations produced by the University of Cardiff at http://www.legalabbrevs.cardiff.ac.uk/
QB is the abbreviation for the Queen's Bench Division, and you need to look for volume 1 for 1961, and the report you are looking for will be on page 394.
If you only know the party names, you can find out where a case has been reported by checking in the Law Reports Consolidated Index, or you can look for the case on one of the legal databases.
Sometimes you will see citations that do not include party names. In most cases, it should still be possible to find the report. You may also see more than one citation for the same case. This means that the case has been reported in more than one series of law reports.
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