Court
A dropdown limited to three values. It filters by the court's code (not its display name) and matches exactly: District Court → hkdc, Court of Appeal → hkca, and Court of Final Appeal → hkcfa. There is no partial or fuzzy matching, and you can only select one court.
Offence and Legislation
These free-text fields look for the words you type. They do not understand search operators such as AND, OR, NOT, *, ?, or ~ — if you type them, they are read as ordinary words rather than commands. Matching ignores capitals, and every word you type must appear somewhere in the field.
Using double quotes
Put double quotes around a set of words to search for them as an exact phrase, in the same order. For example, "occasioning actual bodily harm" finds only that wording in that order, not the individual words scattered elsewhere.
A case may be assigned more than one statute or offence. The search looks across all of them together, so one phrase can be found in one and another word in another, and both still count.
Quoted phrase vs. separate words
The quotes decide how the words must be found, not just which words are present. This matters most when the words could appear apart from each other.
"dangerous drugs" — finds that phrase as written, with the two words together and in order. Only matching wording counts.dangerous drugs (no quotes) — finds cases where both words appear somewhere in the field, even if they are not side by side. It could match "dangerous weapons and drugs" as readily as "dangerous drugs".
In practice, the bare form is broader: it catches cases that mention both concepts without using your exact wording. The quoted form is narrower and more precise. If you are unsure which you need, prefer the quoted phrase when the wording is standard (such as a statutory term), and the bare form when you care about the concepts rather than the exact words.
Finding more than one statute
To find cases that cite both Cap 200 and Cap 210, simply type both, each in quotes, separated by a space. Do not add AND or OR:
"Cap 200" "Cap 210" — returns cases that cite both statutes."Cap 200" AND "Cap 210" — avoid: the word AND is read literally, which can throw off the results."Cap 200" OR "Cap 210" — avoid: the word OR is also read literally, which can narrow your results rather than widen them.
Use semantic ranking
This applies only to the main text query. When unchecked, the text query uses keyword search; when checked, it uses semantic ranking to surface conceptually related paragraphs even without shared keywords.
How they combine
Court, Offence, and Legislation are always applied first as hard constraints, combined with AND. The semantic checkbox only decides how the remaining candidates are ranked against your text query.
Examples
- Court
District Court — judgments restricted to District Court cases. - Offence
"obtaining property by deception" — exact-phrase offence match. - Legislation
"Cap 200" "Cap 210" — cases citing both statutes. - Text
values of expert opinions in drug cases + Use semantic ranking checked + Offence dangerous drugs — first restricted to drug cases, then semantically ranked.