South African Law

Open access unreported decisions

Unreported decisions can be found on the following openly accessible websites:

• Constitutional Court's Cases and Judgments: Includes all cases since 1995. Can be searched or browsed by issue date (court roll term), authors (Judges), title (parties), subjects (currently there is no content here) and case number. The website also contains details of forthcoming hearings, and cases which are awaiting judgment.

  • The records of cases from 2002 contain the Constitutional Court judgment, Summary of judgment, Directions, Earlier judgments of the Courts a quo, Pleadings and Documents, Heads of Argument, and citations from the series of the various South African law reports. The Court is currently digitising these documents for cases between 1995 and 2001.

• The Supreme Court of Appeal's Judgments: Includes all decisions as handed down from 1999 to current. The decisions are arranged by date and alphabetically but cannot be searched. 

• SAFLII: Contains decisions of all South African Superior Courts and some specialist courts. The decisions of individual courts can be browsed by year or searched by case name, legislation or keywords.The database also enables searching across all South African courts simultaneously.

  The SAFLII decision databases are:

  • Constitutional Court (1995 to current)

  • Supreme Court of Appeal (1971 to current)

  • Electoral Court (2001 to current)

  • All High Courts (date ranges vary depending on the Court)

  • Competition Appeal Court (2000 to current)

  • Competition Tribunal (1999 to current)

  • Companies Tribunal (2014 to current)

  • Court of the Commissioner of Patents (2005-2015)

  • Equality Court (2004 to current)

  • Labour Appeal Court (1993 to current)

  • Labour Court (1997 to current) - formerly the Industrial Court (1984 to 1996)

  • Land Claims Court (1996 to current)

  • Tax Court (2001 to current)

  • Water Tribunal (2010 and 2011 only)

  • National Consumer Tribunal (2008 to current)