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Banner Search

You can conduct a Banner Search for keywords in either the:

  • Title, or the
  • Full text of the legislation.

You can also restrict your search to a specific jurisdiction from here.
This can be done from any page within the Lawlex Premium Research service. The feature is in the top right hand corner of the web pages.
You will find the banner search function in the top right hand corner of the screen.

You will also be able to resubmit your previous search by clicking on Last Search.

The Search Legislation page

You can also use the Search Legislation web page for a more guided search. The Search Legislation tab provides you with all the search options
you can use for your legislation research.

Remember, every field you add to your search narrows it, either making it more specific and relevant, or too narrow to pick up accurate results.
So, your first decision is whether to do a Title or a Full text search from the banner or from the Search Legislation page.

The first thing you need to decide is whether it is a Title or Full text search that will get the results you require.

If you know the name of the legislation, then Title searching makes sense. If you are looking for legislation and are unsure of which Act or Regulation deals with it specifically, a full text search is then more appropriate.

To conduct a full text search, you need to think of keywords which can be added to the search template. Generally, keywords and the jurisdiction will be enough for a successful search. The more detail you add, the narrower the search, and this might increase the likelihood of missing important documents. See Search Operators below for more information about how to construct your search.

If you know the Number of the Act or Regulation that you require, add it to the Number field. Similarly, you can add the Year if it is known.

It is also possible to narrow your search to a specific jurisdiction by ticking which one is of interest to you.

The Document Type field allows you to select All types of legislation, or to specifically search for a:

  • Principal Act;
  • Principal Regulation;
  • Amending Act;
  • Amending Regulation; or
  • Bill.

We recommend that you choose the Select All option, unless you are certain that it is a Principal Act or Regulation that you are searching for.

Repealed or Failed Legislation

The Lawlex search engine does not automatically include repealed legislation, however by ticking the Repealed / Failed Legislation box, you will ensure that you pick up this material in your search.

If you include Repealed / Failed Legislation in your search, you can tell whether a title is repealed by checking the Document Status field on the Core Document Homepage (it will say either Current or Repealed)

Year Range restricts your search to a known date range, and you can also nominate how many Search Results are displayed per page (the default is 20, but you can select 5, 10, 30 or 50).

Search Operators

The default operator is AND when using Lawlex to search legislation. This means that you do not need to add the word AND when you are searching for more than one word. For example "firearms knives bombs" will return documents that have "firearms AND knives AND bombs" in them.

Lawlex Search retrieves exactly the words that you enter into the keyword box. Stemming or wildcard searches are not supported. For example, searching for "crim" or "crim*" will not yield "crime" or "criminal". If in doubt, try both forms, for example: "crime" and "criminal"

Symbol

Function

Examples

 

" "

Finds exact terms as quoted.

"criminal law"

AND

Finds pages that contain all terms or phrases.

This is the default operator and is not required.

Criminal AND Law (or just, criminal law)

 

&

Same as AND.

Criminal & Law

NOT

Excludes pages that contain a term or phrase.

criminal NOT law

Same as NOT above.

criminal – law

 

( )

Used to group words in OR and NOT queries.

(criminal law) | (social justice)(family funds) NOT (police stations)

+

Denotes that all search results must include this term. Also allows inclusion of words that search engines usually ignore.

Criminal law + Crime + for Drugs

OR

Finds either term.

 

(criminal law) OR (crime act)

|

Same as OR.

 

criminal | law

Case sensitivity

Lawlex searches are not case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you enter them, are understood as lower case. For example, searches for "criminal law," "Criminal Law," and "Criminal law" all return the same results.

Search results display

Lawlex search results are displayed alphabetically within the Jurisdictions you selected and then by the relevance ranking. You will note that the Jurisdictions you selected are highlighted and the radio button indicates which results are displayed. CLcik on teh radio buttons to display results from other jrisdictions.

In the following example, a search for "privacy and medical" was carried out in the Commonwealth and Queensland jurisdictions. The Commonwealth results are displayed first and you can easily view the Queensland results by selecting the QLD radio button.

Your results will be displayed in the following order:

  • Principal Act
  • Amending Act
  • Principal Regulation
  • Amending Regulation
  • Bills

A statistical relevancy ranking appears beside the item to help you decide the usefulness of items that have been retrieved.

Please note, Lawlex in accordance with its Internet Charter of Use, points to legislation which is hosted on the official government web sites. This means that the full text search indexes produce lists of legislation, with some context to help you decide relevance, but you will not be able to deep link to the search results. Instead, you will be able to use the displayed results to decide what you want to look at in more detail.

We recommend that you use the FIND or SEARCH feature within WORD or ADOBE to go to the specific terms you are interested in within the document itself.

Context and search term highlighting

Every Lawlex search result lists one or more excerpts from the web page to display how your search terms are used in context on that page. Your search terms are displayed in bold text so that you can quickly determine if that result is from a page you want to visit.

Browsing legislation

It is also possible to find legislation by browsing. The Browse Legislation tab appears when you click on Search Legislation.
All principal legislation is indexed and is therefore browsable under the Subject categories. Legislation can also be browsed by using the Alphabetical Index. Lawlex defaults to the subject view, but you can easily change this by clicking on the Alphabetical index.
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