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Secondary Materials Help


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Secondary materials are commentaries and discussions of the law. They comprise such things as journal articles and law reform materials.

Secondary materials are distinct from "primary materials" (such as cases and legislation because they do not form a part of the law itself -- they only describe or discuss it. For this reason they are often extremely useful in coming to grips with an area of law, because most of the analysis has already been done by the author(s).

The NZLII Secondary Legal Materials databases include hypertext links to most relevant material. These generally include the following:

These links are inserted automatically by our hypertext markup software, which uses complex heuristics to determine exactly which documents a citation might refer to. In most cases the links are correct, however sometimes errors are made, due to the nature of English writing, and legal writing in particular.

Using Secondary Materials

Each document is preceded by a number of "links". The meaning of these links is set out below. Not all of these links will appear in all document types.

Printing Secondary Materials

To print a page, you can either use the "Print" function of your web browser, or click [Download] to get the RTF version of the document if one exists, load it into your word processor, and print it from there.

About the Markup

Secondary materials are 'marked up' on a massively automated basis. We are constantly improving this process to add functionality. If you have suggestions, these are more than welcome. Please bear in mind that the mark up process is essentially heuristic in nature - that is, it is designed to make the occasional mistake. If you think that you can suggest a general approach to better taking into account the salient features which are inherent to most case law databases, please send us feedback.


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