About and limits

Lookup. Type a case citation or the name of an Act, and Pinpoint takes you to the official source: the court’s own copy of the judgment, or the Act (and section) on the official legislation register.

Judgment search. Searches the full text of the judgments it holds, with phrases, OR, exclusions and “within N words” searches.

Citator. For each case, the later judgments that cite it, how they appear to treat it, any appeal, and the authorities it relies on.

Pinpoint is not legal advice and not an authorised report or official version of any judgment or legislation. Always read the judgment or the legislation itself, from the official source, before relying on it. Nothing here should be cited as authority.

• Judgments. For most courts, decisions up to March 2025, from the Open Australian Legal Corpus. High Court judgments are kept up to date from the Court’s own website, checked daily. Other courts’ more recent decisions are not yet included: their publishers either do not permit copying or have not yet given permission.
• Gaps. Unpublished, withheld and suppressed decisions are not included, and some tribunals are not covered at all. A search that finds nothing does not mean nothing exists.
• Text. Judgment text was converted from the courts’ files and can contain conversion errors, such as odd spacing, broken tables or lost formatting. Quote from the official copy.
• Legislation. Pinpoint indexes the titles of legislation in force, not its text, and links to the current version on the official register. It does not show past versions; check the register for the version in force at the time that matters. The registers are re-read weekly, so a very new or just-repealed Act may be a few days behind. ACT legislation is not indexed.

The What’s indexed page lists every court and register, with record counts and the oldest and newest in each.

• Counts are of indexed judgments only. “Cited by” counts only judgments in the index. Recent decisions of courts not yet covered, unreported decisions, and textbooks and articles are not counted, so a case can be more (or more recently) cited than it looks.
• Treatments are inferred from wording. “Applied”, “distinguished”, “not followed”, “doubted” and “overruled” are read from the words around each citation. It can misread a passage (a judge quoting counsel’s argument, or discussing another case), and it misses treatment in words it does not recognise. Readings that are impossible under the court hierarchy, such as a lower court “overruling” the High Court, are dropped.
• A warning is a prompt to check, not a finding. A “not followed” or “overruled” warning means a later judgment appears to say so. Read that passage before concluding the case is no longer good law. No warning does not mean a case is still good law.
• Appeals are found from the “decision under appeal” details at the top of an appeal judgment, and the outcome from its orders. An appeal decided by a court not in the index will not be shown.
• Report citations (such as CLR or FCR) are matched to a neutral citation from the citations judges use. A rare or mistyped report citation can occasionally be matched to the wrong case; check the case name.
• Name searches and spelling suggestions are best guesses from party names and the words in the index.

• Judgments: the Open Australian Legal Corpus (Isaacus, CC BY 4.0), and the High Court of Australia’s website. The judgments remain the courts’.
• Legislation titles: the official registers of the Commonwealth and each State and Territory, under CC BY 4.0 or by permission. Western Australian titles are sourced from the Western Australian Legislation website; for the latest information on Western Australian legislation, go to www.legislation.wa.gov.au.
• Links to LawCite and the courts’ and registers’ own websites go to those services; Pinpoint is not connected with them.

There are no accounts, no advertising and no tracking cookies. Your browser remembers the last jurisdiction you chose on the home page; that stays on your device.

Like most websites, the server keeps a short-lived log of requests (the address they came from, the page, and so the words searched) to keep the site running and to stop abuse. The logs are deleted after about two weeks and are not shared or sold. The site is delivered through Cloudflare, which processes requests to do so, and uses Cloudflare’s cookie-free visitor statistics.

Pinpoint is run by Rhett Kipps. Corrections, missing citations and suggestions are welcome: a link to the page that went wrong is the most useful thing you can send.