DEVELOPMENT OF A WEB BASED SYSTEM FOR CITATIONOF COURT CASES

Abstract

Citation of court cases stands a major problem in legal jurisdiction as cases are judged from accumulation of previous judgments using Rules of Precedent. In developing countries, citations are mostly done manually and this leads to long period between the time a case is reported and when accurate judgment is delivered. Reports on previous judgments are often kept piece meal in file cabinets, hence manual citation of court cases had posed a great deal of problem in the administration of Law and Justice. This thesis proposed the development of a web based system for citation of court cases adopting the Shift-Or Pattern Matching Algorithm. The system was implemented on Windows Vista Home Premium using WAMP suite which contains an HTTP APACHE Server as its web server. The database of the system stores a host of data that is needed by the system; the choice of database management system chosen is My Structured Query Language (MySQL), Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) is taken as the middle end engine for interaction between the legal practitioners and the database of the system. HTML and Java scripts respectively are used for the determining the structure and behaviour of the user interface. Case study of decided cases in Ondo State High Court, Akure between 2000 and 2012 was carried out, output of some transactions were reported to show the performance of the proposed system.