Wednesday, 4th December 2024
The easiest place to start is on the Lawyers Page for the area of law that you are interested in.
The Lawyers Pages of Foolkit list the Acts, Regulations, Rules, forms and other items that are most commonly used by lawyers in their daily work.
If we have left out something specific that you are looking for, chances are that you should be able to track it down using the resources listed on those pages.
See if the legislation you are looking for is on Foolkit's Acts Page or Foolkit's Regulations Page.
If it isn't there, then at the top of first column you will find links to get you to any legislation that is not listed by us.
Please bear in mind that AustLII is not always as current as the other legislation web sites and Foolkit. Use Update Status for Legislation to check when AustLII last updated the relevant legislation database.
AustLII is a favourite with the lawyers because they have a good search engine. When you open the legislation you can click on a highlighted word and find special definition used in that document. They display notes on the history of the legislation, and Noteup shows you any cases on their database that refer to the Section that you are looking at.
Please give us feedback about your experiences using Foolkit and ideas for improvements.
Lexology - you can also subscribe for a daily email of topical information.
The Courts are listed on the lawyers pages under the Menu item "Courts". Foolkit generally has a separate page for most State courts. You can use the "On This Page" box to quickly move around.
We only list the items that are most useful to the lawyers and we assume a certain amount of knowledge by them. Our pages and the court pages they link to are certainly not a Do It Yourself guide to running your own court case.
You should at the very least look at all of the court's web site. You should also read Foolkit's State Courts Page or Foolkit's Federal Courts Page.
You will rarely find your answers in one web site, one principle of law or one item of legislation. So, you must use these items with caution.
Lawyers have the advantage of years of training and years of experience working with these items. They also have other resources that they use in conjunction with what is listed in Foolkit. We can't include them as a single subscription to just one of these resources can cost thousands of dollars.
Beware that the information that you find one day may be out of date on another day. If you use our links then you are more likely to have the latest version. If you save a copy to your disk then you won't know when it changes. And the interpretation or determination of the law that is decided by a Judge in one case may not be the correct law if there are other cases that disagree with it, if the Judge's decision is overturned on appeal or if there is a later important case that views things differently.
The wording of an Act may seem plain and straightforward when you read it with the untrained eye or without knowing the full legal context. Disputes over the correct interpretation or words or phrases can rage between lawyers and end up with a Judge having to decide what the words mean or how they are to apply.
There is an explanation of this on Foolkit's Legal System Page.
Sometimes words are given special meanings for the whole of a document or just for the Part of the document that they are in. These special meanings are usually at the start of the document or at the start of that Part.
If you are reading Legislation then there are also Acts Interpretation Acts (there is one for each State and one for the Federal government) that you also need to look at.
