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Judgments & Legal Reference
Judgments & Legal Reference> Judiciary Libraries > Library Information > Collections

Collections

The collection of the Judiciary Libraries is basically of common law materials housed mainly in the High Court Library, Court of Final Appeal Library and District Court Library. These include legal textbooks, case law reports, statutes, legislation, Government Gazette and legal journals primarily of Hong Kong, UK and selectively of Australia, Canada and other common law countries. Many smaller collections are located in the chambers, magistracies and tribunals. Approximately 74,000 volumes of books and serials are located in the High Court Library (including an off-site Storage) and about 12,000 volumes in the Court of Final Appeal Library and 9,500 volumes in the District Court Library. Most of the materials in the collection are in English. The entire English collection is classified and shelved in accordance with the MOYS Classification Scheme. There is a collection of about 4,000 volumes of Chinese language materials in the Judiciary libraries. The Chinese materials are classified and shelved according to the Chinese Library Classification (中國圖書館分類法). The Library Catalogue is available for searching the library collection.

Judgments

In addition, the High Court Library also has a sizeable invaluable collection of some 146,000 unreported judgments of Hong Kong, which were delivered since 1946-1948 and 1966 onwards. The Judgments Collection is arranged according to the folio numbers being assigned. Please access the Legal Reference System for retrieving the folio number of a judgment. The folio number is displayed in the footer toolbar of a full document. In addition to the judgments of the Hong Kong courts, we have 182 copies of Privy Council Appeal Judgments dated before 1997. If you need to search the folio numbers of Privy Council Appeal Judgments, please click here (Adobe Reader is required for viewing PDF documents).

Electronic Resources

The Judiciary Libraries has provided some electronic materials which are accessible by library patrons

Rare Book Collection

The Rare Book Collection holds over seven hundred volumes of early British and Hong Kong legal texts. The collection is housed in the environmentally-controlled rare book room in the High Court Library. You may access further details about the collection via the links below.