The register holds every court decision the Coalition has read, in the order the courts handed them down. That is the right order for a record and the wrong order for a search. A person arriving with a question, whether a court has ever required notice before a removal to a country the person has no connection to, does not want a chronology. He wants the decisions on that question, and he wants to see whether the courts agree.
This page is the other way in. Every record in the register is tagged with the questions it answers, and those tags are turned into the index below. Each category opens the register filtered to that question, so what appears is every decision the Coalition has read on it, including the ones that came out the other way.
What a record contains
The court and the date. The docket number and the citation, where the source supplied them. What the court decided, stated as a disposition rather than as a characterization. A one-sentence statement of the holding. And a link to the court’s own text, so that nobody has to take the Coalition’s summary on trust.
Where a source did not supply a detail, the field is left empty rather than filled with a guess. An empty field is a smaller problem than a confident error, and it is visible, which a confident error is not.
Three cautions about using it
A holding summary is not the opinion. One sentence cannot carry the reasoning, the facts it depended on, or the limits the court placed on it. The summary exists to help a reader decide which opinion to open. It is not a substitute for opening it.
A decision is only law where it is law. A ruling from one district court binds nobody, a court of appeals decision binds the district courts in its circuit, and a circuit that has not addressed a question is not bound by another circuit that has. The register records what each court said. It does not record what any of it means for a particular case in a particular place.
The law moves. A decision in this register was good law when it was read. It may have been stayed, reversed, vacated, or overtaken since. Anyone relying on an entry for a live matter should check its current status in the court’s own records before doing so.
Nothing here is legal advice, and reading it is not a substitute for a lawyer.
How this connects to the rest of the site
Decisions are the evidence the other projects rest on, which is why they are gathered here instead of being scattered through them. A country guide describes what happens to people sent to a particular place; the decisions about those removals are in this register. The diplomatic assurances project explains a doctrine; the cases that made the doctrine are in this register. Every project links into the categories that carry its case law, and this page links back to the projects, so a reader can move between the question and the subject in either direction.