General Help

  • Help for First Time Visitors

    The essential information for first time visitors to AustLII, offered in the hope that it will save hours of frustrating and fruitless searching.

  • User Guide to AustLII

    An explanation of how to use AustLII's main features in a nutshell. More detailed help topics on specific features are set out below.

  • Guide to Legal Research on the Web

    A guide to researching Australian law on the Internet, but also deals with researching international and overseas laws from the perspective of an Australian lawyer.

  • Search Help

    Information on how to search AustLII for materials, including basic and advanced search techniques and tips. Help is given for both beginner and advanced users on using AustLII's SINO search engine.

  • Legal Publishers Search Help

    Information on how to search the online content of participating Australian legal publishers using AustLII.

  • Displaying Search Results Help

    Information on how to use the AustLII search results interface to refine how your search results are displayed.

  • LawCite Help

    Information on how to use LawCite, AustLII's free International Law Citator.

  • Case Law Help

    Help on how to navigate and use case law (court judgments, tribunal decisions), such as help on printing, searching and downloading.

  • Legislation Help

    Introduction to legislation and help on how to navigate and use legislation. Also includes help on printing, searching and downloading acts and regulations.

  • Secondary Materials Help

    Help on how to navigate and use secondary materials, such as help on printing, locating organisation home pages and searching sites.

  • Australian Taxation Office Rulings and Determinations Help

    Help on how to navigate and use the Australian Taxation Office Rulings and Determinations databases.

  • Australian Treaties Library Help

    Help on the Australian Treaties Library.

  • Downloading Help

    Help on viewing an entire act or set of regulations as well as cases, and downloading files for printing.

  • AustLII Toolbar Help

    Describes how to install/uninstall and configure the AustLII Toolbar for the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser and the Netscape, Mozilla Suite, SeaMonkey Suite and Mozilla Firefox web browsers on supported operating systems.

Advanced Search Help Topics

  • SINO Full Documentation

    Full documentation for the SINO search engine used by AustLII, including supported search language emulations, full boolean syntax and support for regular expressions.

  • SINO Search Operators

    An explanation of the search operators (including boolean) which are supported by the SINO search engine.

  • SINO Common Words

    A "common word" is a word that is so common that it is ignored in searches unless preceded by either a # sign or a + sign. This is the list of common words used by AustLII.

Web Developer Help Topics

  • AustLII Usage Policy

    Policy on use of documents located on AustLII

  • Linking Policy

    Information on AustLII's policy for "deep linking", or linking to AustLII resources. Includes guidelines for acceptable framing of AustLII content and other information.

  • AustLII Logos, Buttons

    If you'd like to put a link to AustLII on your own web pages we have some logos and buttons that you can use.

  • Search Form Examples

    Contains sample HTML that you can cut and paste into your own web pages to provide an AustLII search form from them.

  • SINO CGI API

    Build sophisticated search forms into AustLII and put them in your own web pages. If your web site is on a particular area of law, you will be able to build search forms targeting that area. Requires some knowledge of writing HTML forms. Examples included.