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South African Law

Unreported Decisions 

Open Access Unreported Decisions

The Constitutional Court's Cases and Judgments website

Includes all cases since 1995. It 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 webpage

Includes all decisions as handed down from 1999 to current. The decisions are arranged by date and alphabetically but cannot be searched.

SAFLII

Decisions of all South African Superior Courts and some specialist courts are available as unreported judgments on SAFLII. 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)

The decisions of individual courts can be browsed by year or searched by eg: case name, legislation or keywords.The search database can also be used to search all South African courts simultaneously.  

SAFLII includes citations to the decisions in law reports. The titles of the report series are abbreviated. To find the full title so you can check the catalogue for holdings, use the Law Library's Legal Abbreviations webpage. For example, the following case was heard in the Constitutional Court. The citation lists firstly the file numbers, then the medium neutral citation ([2016] ZACC 1) the ILJ (Industrial Law Journal), the BCLR (Butterworths Constitutional Law Reports), and the BLLR (Butterworths Labour Law Reports). to check if we have any of these report series, refer to the Law Reports page of this Guide.