-- ChrisKenward - 04 June 2025

Frequently Asked Questions

I just got a 410 gone message from the main NZLII site - what is happening?

The most likely cause is that your IP address comes within a IP range that has been blocked due to unusual activity indicating a breach of our terms of use.

If your use is genuine, please email feedback@nzlii.org

Can you help decipher what the abbreviations after this case name stand for?

Legal terms can seem like a foreign language. There are some publications that can help explain what the letters after a case name refers to - see for example The New Zealand Law Style Guide, the Cardiff Index to legal abbreviations or Legal citations of Aotearoa New Zealand

Advice

Can you give me some advice please?

No we can not give any legal advice. We merely provide the materials for our users to read themselves.

We recommend you try contacting either Community Law or Citizens Advice

Both sites have plain english guides to various legal topics that might be able to provide the answer - or at least give you an idea of what material you need to be looking at on NZLII.

NZLII also has some plain English guides - check out our ACC guide, our guide to the JP Traffic Court, Motor Vehicle Disputes Tribunal, or how to lay a complaint with the Independent Police Conduct Authority.

Bankruptcy Information

By law, bankruptcies, and those whom are made bankrupt are public. Notices regarding bankruptcy are published in the New Zealand Gazette as per the Insolvency Act. This means we will not remove cases and notices regarding bankruptcies unless directed to do so by the Court.

Broken Links

Broken links (ie links which produce a file not found message) maybe able to be fixed and should be reported via the feedback@nzlii.org email with details of the URL of the page where the link is located and what you expected to find.

Sometimes the broken link is due to the system finding a reference to a case within another case and the software automatically creating a link for it - when we have never had the decision on NZLII. We are unlikely to be able to source the decision.

If the broken link is from a report or journal article, we are not able to fix as we do not alter the original work.

Can I send you a case to put on NZLII?

Yes, you certainly can - feedback@nzlii.org will reach us.

It will be assessed as to whether it is suitable for publication - are there any statutory or case specific prohibitions on publication attached to it? If there was, and you know that they have expired then proof of that expiry would be helpful. If the decision has been reported, including the citation would mean we can include that with the case information.

Can you correct a broken link in a journal article please?

No. The journal articles are as written by the authors, NZLII does not alter their content.

Decision removed?

Why is the decision I am wanting listed as Decision Removed and when will it be returned?

The decision generator - the Court, Tribunal, Authority - has asked us to remove the decision. This could be for a number of reasons, including temporary take down to allow redactions or corrections, permanent take down for fair trial or suppression issues or because it was discovered that publication could be breaching statutory requirements.

Most decisions that we are asked to remove end up not being replaced. If you need a copy you may need to use a commercial legal publisher or contact the decision generator.

Download (how to)

Where available, use the [Download] link at the top of a document. This will provide a menu of download formats. Courts would prefer if you use the PDF version if you are using it in Court.

Footnotes

Why are there footnotes messing up the text of the case?

We convert documents from PDF to html to allow fulltext searching. Unfortunately the process we use does not recognise footnotes - thus they appear in the same place on the html page as it does on the PDF pages. When NZLII was much smaller we redid footnotes to make the appearance asthetically more pleasing, but with 3000+ documents being added each month there is no way we can do this.

Choosing to download a PDF will eliminate the display issue.

Google

Is someone able to google my name and it take them to a case on NZLII involving me?

No, NZLII has a no spiders/search engine text on our case law databases. Search engines like google respect this and do not index material in those databases. We do allow them to do so in the legislative, journal and 'other' databases (including the New Zealand Gazette).

Guest posts

Can I submit a guest post to be published on NZLII?

No. We do not have guest posts on NZLII.

How do I find a specific Act?

If you are after a current ("in force") New Zealand Act then the easiest method might be to go to the NZ Acts database, and browse to it using either the year (if known) or the letter of the alphabet the name of the Act starts with.

You can also use Autosearch. Just type the name (and if desired) the section reference into the search box on the NZLII front page. Austsearch will display a list of matching legislation

How do I find a specific case?

There are three main ways to find a specific case.

1. You can go to the database it should be in, the year it should be decided and browse the page. This works best on the smaller databases, or where it is possible you do not have the name exactly correct.

2. You can enter the citation to the case in the search box on the front page of NZLII.

3. Use Lawcite. Lawcite allows you to enter in party names, or the citation to the case. Not only will LawCite give you a link to the case (in green right at the top of the page) - if it is on NZLII but will provide you with a list of cases and articles that have cited your case.

I'm looking for a case from the NZLR. Why can't I find it on NZLII?

NZLR - New Zealand Law Reports are published by a commercial company. As they are under copyright we can not publish them as they are. Yes, we know that the older volumes are out of copyright and technically we could put them up on NZLII but we do not wish to pick a fight with a multi-national company. The law reports that we have published we either have received permission to do so (like the ACC Reports or the Matrimonial Property Cases) or copyright is not an issue (eg Crown Copyright, Creative Commons or aged out of Copyright).

The New Zealand Law Reports are available to purchase as individual cases to use in Court at lawreports.nz

If a case is reported in the NZLR's then you should use that version in your Court bundle. To make it easier for our users to find the NZLR version of cases that the unreported (version that was issued by the Court) version is on NZLII, we have put links in those cases to the reported version on lawreports.nz so users can purchase it for Court if necessary. We have only done this for cases post 2006. So if you see the following at the top of the case you are viewing - For a Court ready (fee required) version please follow this link - then that is the reason.

Incorrect link

I have found an incorrect link - why and how can it be fixed?

Because of the sheer size of NZLII (which is only a subset of AustLII) we do not manually create links - we rely on the software to do it. Sometimes, like people, it makes mistakes. It is making "intelligent guesses". Some of those mistakes we can fix, some are a lot more complicated.

If you do spot an error feel free to email feedback@nzlii.org

Linking to NZLII

May I link to a case, report or database on NZLII?

Yes, certainly.

What we do not allow is wholesale downloading of a database or databases.

Missing case

I'm looking for a particular case and I can not find it on NZLII. Why not and can you make it available please?

There are a number of reasons including

- the case may have a suppression order associated with it

- it may have involved a pre-trial matter

- it might be too old for us to have received it in an unreported format*

- some Courts, particularly the District and Family Courts, make only a tiny fraction of their decisions available for publication

- unfortunately many of the tribunals are no longer releasing every single decisions as was the practice in the past so there are increasing gaps in our collection

- there are some decisions of the High Court and Court of Appeal from the late 1990s and early 2000s which we are slowly processing and loading to NZLII - resource constraints mean that the process of working through over 50,000 decisions does take time.

* when a decision is reported the legal publisher has copyright in the published format and headnote. The Law Report series we have on NZLII are either out of copyright or the copyright holder granted us permission to scan and load.

Requesting the removal of case involving myself

If you believe that the publication of a case involving yourself, or a family member, is breaching

a) the law or

b)a Court order or

c) is causing you extreme hardship

The remedy unfortunately lies with the original decision maker and not initially NZLII.

Contact the court, tribunal or authority that made the decision and talk with staff there about the procedure necessary to request a suppression order. Do mention that the decision is available on NZLII (and check to see if it is also available on the Ministry of Justice or decision generators website). The decision generator will contact us if they decide the decision needs to come down either temporarily or permanently and supply us with a revised decision if applicable.

Please be aware that each court and tribunal will have specific guidelines on the circumstances in which this will be done.

Research Assistance please

Can you please help me research this legal issue I have?

Unfortunately this is not a service we offer. We have no resources to provide help like this.

We recommend you try contacting either Community Law or Citizens Advice

Both sites have plain english guides to various legal topics that might be able to provide the answer - or at least give you an idea of what material you need to be looking at on NZLII.

NZLII also has some plain English guides - check out our ACC guide, our guide to the JP Traffic Court, Motor Vehicle Disputes Tribunal, or how to lay a complaint with the Independent Police Conduct Authority.

RSS Feeds

Sorry, NZLII does not currently have RSS feed capability.

Unofficial Medium Neutral Citations

Why does NZLII put MNC's (Medium Neutral Citations) on decisions that pre-date the official adoption date of such by the relevant Court or Tribunal?

For cases and other documents to be loaded to NZLII, they must have a neutral citation. It is what creates a stable URL and the whole system of scripts that NZLII/AustLII operates depend on the MNC’s.

We operate on such a tiny budget that we need a uniform way of doing things to attempt to automate as much as we can. We simply can not exist without using NZLII applied MNC’s.

AustLII was a prime developer of the MNC system that has been adopted in many of the Common Law legal systems.

What cases can I expect to find on NZLII and what is probably not there?

Check out the database listing page for a range of dates associated with each database.

For many, the coverage may be poor for the earlier years listed. For the major Court databases - Supreme, Appeal, High, Māori Appellate, Māori Land - more complete coverage starts mid-2000s. For the Employment Court, Environment Court, ACC appeals to the District Court, Employment Relations we have almost complete coverage*

*Recently the ACC appeals to the District Court have been harder to obtain from the Ministry of Justice and more gaps are appearing.

Why can't I find a specific Act?

Is it a 1908 Act? If so, look in the 1908 consolidation database - http://www.nzlii.org/nz/legis/hist_act_1908/

How old is the Act? If it is older than 2007 then you should be able to find it in Acts as Enacted database 1841-2007

If the Act has been repealed after 2007 it should be in our Repealed Acts database.

Why can't I find XYZ Court/Tribunal's decisions on NZLII?