Legal Cases

AFCS and WPS decisions are based upon the legislation and relevant case law.  The relevant legislation is linked in our Resources-Legislation section

There is currently no Veterans Law Report (we're working on it!), leaving it difficult to identify relevant case law.  This site aims to be a first step in resolving that.

We aim for this legal case section to be as accessible as possible to all requiring assistance, be they veterans, service personnel, lawyers or the general public.

What this site currently offers

• Upper Tribunal: Decisions of the Administrative Appeals Chamber
  • Currently available on this site: Jan 2016 - Dec 2023, 33 decisions and summaries (judgments available to download)
  • Next step: Upload pre-2016 decisions, and all full decisions to enable detailed searching
• The Bano Companion: Links to the key 200 judgments referred to in Judge Bano's 2021 book "War Pensions and Armed Forces Compensation: Law and Practice (2nd edition)".
  
  • Currently has links to 70 of these significant judgments (more soon coming)
    

Case law introduction

The University of Oxford's Faculty of Law has a useful page, "Law Reports and the doctrine of precedent".  Their article discusses the role of law reports and the doctrine of precedent in the UK's legal system, highlighting the importance of case law as a source of law and the hierarchy of courts.  It also delves into the structure and content of law reports, as well as explaining case citations.  Key takeaways:

1. Case law, recorded in Law Reports, forms the bulk of law in the United Kingdom and operates through the doctrine of precedent, wherein courts are bound by decisions of higher or equivalent courts.
2. The hierarchy of UK courts, including the Supreme Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union, influences the application of the doctrine of precedent and the authoritative nature of legal decisions.
3. Law reports contain essential elements such as party names, catchwords, headnotes, and judgments, and their understanding is crucial for legal practitioners and students.

Precedents arise from the reasons for the decisions made in past cases, in legal speak the ‘ratio decidendi’.  It is these reasons that ‘bind’ future cases and only for cases with similar reasoning or conclusions.

i.e. not all aspects of a higher court case apply to all lower court cases.  It can be difficult for non-lawyers to differentiate between the two.  We intend to highlight the significant areas of decisions which can be applied to other cases.