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Where to find Criminal Cases

Criminal law is a specific practice area with its own procedure and governing laws. As case law is one of the major sources of criminal law, finding cases to help you in your practice is a core issue that requires its own dedicated write up. As a criminal law practitioner, writer and co-editor of a law report specific to this practice area, I spend most of my time reading criminal cases.

Here is a list of all the places I find criminal law cases:

1. Law Reports: Law reports are specifically dedicated to curating relevant and groundbreaking cases that significantly add to our criminal jurisprudence, by either emphatically restating, changing, adding to or setting aside an existing legal position. Note that a law report differs from a case database, for whereas a database is a collection of court cases with nothing more to it, a law report has other elements such as the headnotes or summary, the holdings and the list of cases cited. I use three major printed law reports:

a. The Criminal Law Report of Ghana - Court of Appeal and Supreme Court decisions.

b. The Supreme Court of Ghana Law Report - Supreme Court decisions.

c. Ghana Law Report - High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court.


2. Online case databases: These online platforms have a collection of decided cases available either for free or by subscription. Cases can be searched for using keywords and can also be downloaded for offline use. Some of these databases have citations that can be used when making references to the cases. Others have features of a law report including headnotes and holdings. These databases are updated in real time and some have cases as recent as from July 2022.

a. Ghana Legal Information Institute:  https://ghalii.org/home  (Tip: the next time you search for a case or key word on any search engine, add ‘ghalii’ to the search query).

b. Dennis Law: https://www.dennislawgh.com/login

c. Judy Legal: https://www.judy.legal/


3. Offline databases: Digital Attorney is one of the largest offline sources of criminal law cases.

4. Courts: Did you know that you can apply for a copy of a judgement of a court? This can be done with a letter addressed to the Registrar of the specific court that delivered the judgement. The letter must contain the title of the judgement  and other relevant details that will help identify it.

5. Other cases: It is imminent that there will be unreported cases that you may never hear about. Yet, in reading one case or the other, you will find the Judges making reference to and applying some of these cases. These case references are usable by citing the case which contains them.

6. Informal case collection: As a member of several law groups on social media, there are times when learned colleagues share judgements from their own cases. I collect these cases in a folder and some proved useful when I encountered similar fact patterns or legal issues. You can also collect your own judgements which you can share with others. 

This list will be updated periodically when I discover or get criminal cases from other sources. 

Do you have other sources not mentioned above? Please share them in the comments.

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