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Westlaw New Zealand

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Westlaw New Zealand Tip - How to find commentary on a section of legislation (Annotated Legislation)

Last Published: July 11, 2022

The global search bar is the fastest way to locate commentary for a section of legislation.

You can either open a section of legislation and then navigate to the section’s direct commentary or you can enter the act name and open the table of contents within the commentary publication.

Locate Commentary for a Section of Legislation

  1. To find a section of an Act, simply type in the section/provision number followed by the name of the Act.
  2. Choose from the type ahead suggestion in the drop down suggestion to display the section of the Act.  e.g. section 9 of the Fair Trading Act 1986

 

  1. Click on the Citing References Tab which provides links to cases and secondary sources that have referred to that section of the Act. Select Secondary Sources.

  1. The Annotated Legislation or commentary discussing the section of legislation appears at the top of the results list. This is done by sorting the citing references by treatment.  Click on the title of the section to open the view the direct commentary. 
  2. Further secondary sources that cite the provision also appear and can be filtered by Publication Name, which appears on the left.

Locate Commentary for an Act

  1. To open the Table of Contents of an act within a Commentary Publication, start typing the name of the act in the Global Search bar and the Typeahead feature will provide suggestions. e.g., Fair Trading
  2. Click Secondary Sources.
  3. Click the Act name, with a reference to the Commentary Publication from the dropdown suggestions. e.g., Fair Trading Act 1986, Gault on Commercial Law.

Note: Please note in some instances several commentary databases may provide commentary on the same legislation.

  1. The Table of contents will be displayed. Click on the plus symbol (+) to expand the table of contents. e.g., Fair Trading Act 1965, section 9. Click on the words of the section title to open the legislation and direct commentary.

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