BAILII — free British and Irish case law, in one place
BAILII publishes British and Irish primary legal materials — judgments, legislation, law-reform reports and more — free of charge and without registration. Ten of the UK judgments in this directory link to it.
- Published by
- British and Irish Legal Information Institute, a UK registered charity (no. 1084803), hosted by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (London) and the Law Faculty, University College Cork.
- Type
- Free legal-information database.
- Jurisdiction
- United Kingdom and Ireland, with EU and European Court of Human Rights collections.
- Versions and language
- English; live website.
- Primary audience
- Lawyers, DPOs, researchers, litigants in person.
- Topic tags
- case law · judgments · legislation · misuse of private information · subject access
- Availability
- Free, no registration.
Why it matters
When a privacy question turns on what a court actually said — the reach of a subject access request, what counts as personal data, when a claim in misuse of private information runs — the judgment itself is the source, and BAILII is where UK practitioners without a commercial subscription read it. Its coverage spans the UK and Irish courts along with EU and ECtHR materials, which for data protection work means Durant, Campbell, Bridges, Lloyd v Google and their successors sit alongside the Strasbourg surveillance line in one free resource.
Coverage is broad but not complete — it depends on feeds from courts and other sources, and older material varies by court — so absence from BAILII is not evidence that a judgment does not exist. For England and Wales judgments from 2001 onwards, The National Archives’ Find Case Law is the official companion source. The UK position needs no translation here: this is UK primary material.