Finding Cases: Video 2 for the end of the chapter

Transcript Area

We want to find the citation of a case that was heard in the House of Lords that involved a finger being mistaken for an imitation firearm. So, we are using Westlaw here and we'll start - because it’s a case that we want to find - by going up to the ‘Cases’ tab. And this time we're going to go and use the Advanced Search, because we know some more about the case. We know it involved a finger and an imitation firearm, so we can put that into the free text box, like that. We can also specify the courts that we want to search as well. So, in this case we’ll go “House of Lords”. Let’s see what we get.

We actually only get one match for that search which is The Crown against Peter Bentham, which was heard in the House of Lords in 2005. We’ll go through and have a look at the transcript to make sure it's the case that we want. So here we’ve got the head note that we can look at, which’ll give us a summary of the facts. The defendant broke into the victim's house, put his hand in his jacket, pointed his fingers at the victim, and the victim thought that the defendant was in possession of a gun. So that looks like the case that we want.

What we are being asked for is the citation, which we have at the top. And we’ve got two citations here: the first being the neutral citation, which is 2005 UK House of Lords “18” (and the 18 that means that it was the eighteenth case by the House of Lords in 2005). We’ve also got a law report citation here which is 2005, the first volume, The Weekly Law Reports, starting at page 1057.

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