Nathaniel Lindley, later Lord Lindley, Master of the Rolls, was a distinguished barrister and judge whose career in the latter half of the 19th century spanned the great modernising and reforming period of Queen Victoria’s reign. While commerce was transformed by steam, travel by the railway, communications by the Post Office and telegraph, and public health by the installation of sewers, for a long time the law remained stuck in a medieval confusion of different courts, professions and jurisdictions. All that was to change with the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1975, which reorganised the myriad courts and jurisdictions into a single High Court of Justice. Its different divisions administered the complete range of equitable, common law, admiralty and ecclesiastical remedies, with appeals going to a single Court of Appeal.

But even before the courts were reorganised, the way their decisions were reported had been the subject of classic Victorian reforming zeal. In 1849, a report of the Law Amendment Society complained that although the decisions of the courts and tribunals were “the formal constituents of the common law” (in that they could be cited as precedent on questions of legal principle) they were “in no respect officially promulgated”. In 1863, a barrister, WTS Daniel QC, wrote to the Solicitor-General, Sir Roundell Palmer, complaining of the “enormous expense, prolixity, delay and irregularity in publication,” of the numerous reporters then competing for business in the legal market, and of their habit of “reporting cases indiscriminately and without reference to their fitness or usefulness as precedents, merely because, having been reported by rivals, the omission of them might prejudice circulation and consequently diminish profit”. Along with that letter, he sent a copy of a legal paper by fellow barrister Nathaniel Lindley, essentially setting out what should – and just as importantly what should not – be reported.

When, two years later, the Inns of Court and the Law Society got together to form a Council of Law Reporting to manage a unified, comprehensive, reliable, and “modestly priced” system of law reporting for the benefit of the profession as a whole, the Lindley criteria were the principles according to which it chose to select the cases for inclusion in The Law Reports.

Soon afterwards, the council was incorporated, and ICLR (as it became) acquired charitable status, confirmed by the courts, by reason of its educational value, as well as the support it continues to provide to the administration of justice. Just as important, for the rule of law, is the principle that justice must be administered in an open and transparent way, and this is reflected in ICLR’s activities today — selecting the most important cases for reporting, but also publishing and providing information and tools to help find cases of interest for other purposes, such as public legal education, academic research, and digital data analysis.

Throughout our operations, however, runs the golden thread of Lindley’s criteria, which continue to govern how we select and report cases to this day, both in the Law Reports and in our other series, such as the Weekly Law Reports (WLR), Industrial Cases Reports (ICR), Business Law Reports (Bus LR), and the Public and Third Sector Law Reports (PTSR). All of these are available online, at modest subscription cost, along with all freely available unreported judgment transcripts, via the ICLR.4 platform.

For more about how we select our cases, see The ICLR guide to reportability

For more about the history of law reporting, see: The Past, Present and Future of the ICLR

For more about the life of Lord Lindley, see Interrogating the Self-told Narrative: Lord Lindley’s Autobiography, his Life and his Legal Biography