verify-hca-judgment-l0cka

Verify HCA Judgment

Use hcourt.gov.au as the controlling source. Produce a provenance record, not a bare assertion that a case "exists".

The website's coverage (checked 2026-08-26) is four collections, and nothing else: judgments 1998 to current, Commonwealth Law Reports volumes 1–100 (roughly 1903–1959), unreported judgments 1906–1994 (an incomplete set, per the Court), and single Justice judgments since January 2024. Judgment summaries (since December 2002) are not judgments and are not a verification source. Reported decisions from roughly 1959 to 1997 — CLR volumes above 100 — are not published there. A citation in that gap is UNVERIFIABLE at the official publisher, never NOT FOUND. Note also that the High Court only began issuing medium-neutral citations in 1998; an earlier [YEAR] HCA N citation is a retrospective identifier that the official publisher does not index, so verify such cases by case name and reported citation instead.

Read ../../references/case-law-verification-method.md before verifying. It defines the outcome semantics, access rules and restriction handling.

Workflow

1. Fix the scope.
   • Accept medium-neutral [YEAR] HCA N citations, CLR citations within volumes 1–100, ALJR citations, and High Court case names.
   • Return OUTSIDE SCOPE for other courts, transcripts (HCATrans), special-leave dispositions unless published as judgments, treatment analysis or advice.
2. Place the citation inside or outside coverage.
   • Determine which collection should hold the decision. If none can — most reported decisions from roughly 1959 to 1997 — return UNVERIFIABLE with the coverage boundary stated and a manual path (the Court registry or a library copy of the report series).
3. Resolve the citation at the official publisher.
   • Search the matching collection's keyword search by distinctive case name terms, then match the result row's displayed Citation: field exactly. The keyword index does not match bracketed citation strings, so never conclude anything from a citation-string search alone.
   • The 1998–current collection publishes each judgment PDF at a deterministic path (/sites/default/files/eresources/YEAR/HCA/N.pdf); a resolved and opened PDF corroborates the citation, but cite it only after it resolved and was inspected.
   • Make one targeted lookup per citation. Do not crawl listings.
4. Confirm identity.
   • Match the case name, year, citation number and decision date as published. Record the case name exactly as the Court publishes it.
   • Treat a supplied case name that differs materially from the published name as a qualification, and say which differs.
5. Check restrictions before reproducing anything.
   • Look for suppression or non-publication notations and pseudonymised parties on the judgment page. Preserve any found.
6. Report using the result contract.