Graham Greenleaf and the team at the Australian Legal Information Institute have released LawCite Alpha. LawCite Alpha provides, free of charge, case citations from international tribunals, such as ICJ and ICTY, and dozens of foreign courts, including Australia, Malaysia, Canada, Thailand, South Africa and the United States. The database includes common law and civil law jurisdictions. Fortunately, the search interface is quite forgiving, so there is no need to worry about spacing and periods, as long as the citation is correct. In addition to citations, one can search by jurisdiction, party name and legislation. LawCite Alpha also contains citations to law journal articles, searchable by citation, author, and title.  Many thanks to Graham and his colleagues for sharing this useful research tool.

LawCite Alpha

http://www.austlii.edu.au/LawCite/

Additional information from the Law Cite Alpha press release.

There are over two million cases for which LawCite holds citation records at present. This number is expected to increase very significantly as LawCite develops. It also includes early development of a law journal article citator, tracking citations of journal articles in both cases and other articles.

LawCite is constructed solely by automated means, by the extraction of citation information from

the content of legal information institutes, available through the cooperation of the Free Access to Law Movement.  It is an international citator, provides citation records for cases decided by courts in at least 50 countries (though with considerably varying coverage).  It therefore also includes numerous citations of cases by courts in jurisdictions other than the one in which the case was decided. Lawcite does not include editorial judgments of whether a case was distinguished, reversed, etc by subsequent cases. It concentrates on demonstrating the patterns of case citation, and also provides parallel citations for cases.