Searching Tips

Here are some short tips on searching the Justis databases, with links to more detailed information.

To find documents that contain all of the words you are looking for, you should use the and operator.

For example, to find documents that contain both the word “injury” and the word “alcohol”, search for:

injury and alcohol

[AND is the default operator. If you type 2 or more adjacent words, you will get the same result as if you typed AND between each word.]
Do not include too many words in a phrase, for example if you are looking for the Gapper v. Chief Constable of the Avon and Somerset Constabulary case, instead of searching for the whole title, search the Parties field for:

gapper and somerset

Do not include “v”, “vs”, or “versus” when searching for the name of a case.
To find documents that contain any of the words you are looking for, you should use the or operator. For example:

disability or incapacity
To find documents that contain a phrase, type double quotation marks around the phrase, for example:

"human rights"

If your phrase includes a word that functions as an operator, then you must also enclose the whole phrase in double quotes, for example:

"health and safety"
To find a word that may or may not contain a diacritic, replace the accented character with a ? wild card. For example:

ucht?ala

will find documents that contain either Uchtala or Uchtála.
To find a word when you are unsure of the spelling, replace the uncertain portion with a * wild card. For example:

ste*enson

will find documents that contain Steavenson, Stephenson or Stevenson.
When using * or ? wild cards to find variations on words, make sure that your search is not too general. For example, any of these searches:

a*
ab*
a???

would find a huge number of documents, and so Justis will not attempt your search. Please use more characters to the left of your wild card.
When using fuzzy searching to find variations on words, your search may find huge numbers of documents on the Quick Search screen, in the Full Text boxes, and in large, named fields such as Judgment. Fuzzy searching works best in small, named fields such as Parties.

Specifying too low a precision can also cause problems. For example, in the Parties field:

smith~0.1

would find a huge number of documents, and so Justis will not attempt to display the results of your search. Please specify a higher precision.