A judgment is not a blog post, and a daily court list is not a judgment. Australians who write to AustLII as if it were a complaints desk at a masthead are asking the wrong institution to do a job it was built not to do. Open justice is the default. Disappearing a decision because you dislike the result is not a service on offer.
If you remember one distinction from this guide, make it this one: the list, the reasons, and the republication. The list is an administrative notice that a matter is on tomorrow. The reasons are what a judge chose to publish. The republication is AustLII, Jade, a news archive or a broker who scraped either. Each has a different owner and a different letter. The Australian law hub is the statute shelf. This article is the records problem underneath it.
Daily lists are not the decision
Every jurisdiction that sits in public publishes some version of a daily list: parties, courtrooms, sometimes a short matter type. Practitioners need to know where to stand. The list is not a finding of fact. It is a timetable.
Lists are ephemeral by design. They are replaced the next sitting day. That does not mean they vanish. Court websites are crawled. “Who appeared in the Magistrates’ Court on 14 March” becomes a cached HTML page, then a people-search field, then a Google card that outlives the list by years.
What you can sometimes do with a list: ask the registry whether a spent list can come off the live site, especially where it identifies a protected person; use cache tools once the live page is gone; treat a scraped copy as a broker or archive problem, not as a request to rewrite the court’s own record of that day.
What you cannot do: pretend a listing never happened because the charge was withdrawn or the civil claim settled. Withdrawal changes the legal result. It does not rewrite the fact that the matter was listed. If the listing is being used as if it were a conviction, that is a publisher problem — often a news archive or a broker caption — not an AustLII problem.
Published reasons, and why they stick
When a court publishes reasons, it is doing the central thing open justice requires: showing the public how power was used. The Federal Court, the High Court, the state and territory supreme courts, and a long tail of tribunals put written reasons on their own sites. AustLII and commercial citators then harvest those files.
AustLII — the Australasian Legal Information Institute — is a free-access project, not a tabloid. Jade and similar citators are commercial layers on the same public reasons. Neither decided your case. Neither may edit a superior-court order because a party has moved suburbs.
This is the point at which “take it down” usually fails. The reasons are an official act of publication. The live routes that actually move a file are narrow:
Suppression and non-publication orders. If a court has ordered that a name, a fact or a file not be published, that order binds the people it binds. AustLII, Jade and any news organisation that republished the reasons need the order, the URL and the operative paragraph. A solicitor’s letter that is not an order is lobbying. Send the order to the court first if the court’s own file still shows the name, then to the republication layer.
Statutory anonymity. Family law, children, many sexual-offence complainants, some adoption and some migration matters are not waiting on a judge’s extra order. The statute already forbids identification. If a published file has breached that rule, you are reporting an error in the pipeline, not asking for a favour. Start with the court that generated the file. AustLII will usually follow a corrected version. It will not invent a pseudonym the court did not use.
Administrative error. The wrong PDF behind the right catchwords. A party name misspelled so that it identifies the wrong human. A file that was never meant to leave the registry. These are fixed by the court, not by a reputation vendor.
What is not a route: you lost; you later settled; the media coverage was larger than the reasons; a search of your name now returns the catchwords; you find the result embarrassing. Open justice survives embarrassment. That is the point of it.
AustLII, Jade, and the habit of writing to the mirror
People write to AustLII because AustLII is what Google showed them. That is usually backwards. AustLII is a republication layer with a public-interest mandate. It does not sit above the court. If the court’s own file still carries the name, blanking the AustLII copy is a courtesy the next harvest will undo.
A working order of letters:
- The court or tribunal that published the reasons. Ask for the precise remedy you can name: a replacement PDF, a statutory or ordered pseudonym, a takedown of a file published in error. Attach the order or the provision. Quote the paragraph.
- AustLII. Once the court has acted, or where AustLII hosts a copy the court has already withdrawn, send the same paper and the AustLII URL. Ask them to match the court. Do not send a speech about reputation.
- Jade and any other citator. Give them the court reference and the new URL. They are not a court of appeal.
- News archives and brokers. A masthead that turned the reasons into a headline is a publisher. A people-search site that turned the catchwords into a profile is a broker. See news archives for the first. Do not confuse either with AustLII.
If the reasons are accurate, public and not suppressed, there is no polite form that will make them unofficial. The work, if there is any, moves to how they are described — a stale news snippet, a broker caption that calls a civil claim a conviction. That is Search and publisher work. It is not a judgment takedown.
Suppression is real, and it is not a vibe
Suppression and non-publication orders are court orders. They are granted on evidence, for defined purposes, and they are narrower than most people hope. “I would rather this not be Googleable” is not a purpose. Risk to a fair trial, risk to a person’s safety, and the protection of people the statute already shields, are.
If you already have an order, use it. Do not paraphrase it and hope a volunteer at AustLII will guess the operative words. Attach the order as the court permits. If the order is itself suppressed, say so in the cover note so the recipient does not paste your name into a ticket that later leaks.
If you do not have an order and you think you need one, you are no longer in a records article. You are in a solicitor’s office, and probably in the territory mapped by defamation after the 2021 reforms or by the procedure rules of the court that sat. This desk does not apply for suppression.
A suppression order made in one court does not rewrite every replica on earth. You still have to notify the people publishing the file. AustLII cannot guess that a County Court order exists. Make a list of URLs. That list is the job.
Why the myth persists
The myth of the disappearing judgment is sold by two industries. Reputation agencies promise a “legal takedown” that is, on inspection, a letter to AustLII and an invoice. Search shops promise to “push it down” and then discover that case names are durable queries.
Some files really do come down: a family-law identification, a sexual-offence complainant, a PDF published in error. People see those outcomes and generalise. They should not. Those outcomes are the statute and the order working, not a precedent for deleting a costs judgment.
Open justice is why you can read why a licence was taken or a company wound up. The same principle that lets a journalist quote the reasons keeps your name in the catchwords.
A working sequence, if any of the live routes apply:
- Identify whether you are looking at a daily list, the court’s own reasons, or a republication.
- Read the first page of the reasons for a suppression note, a pseudonym or a statutory warning.
- Write to the court if the file is wrong or the statute was missed. Write to AustLII only after, or in parallel where they host a copy the court has already withdrawn.
- Notify Jade, news archives and any broker that packaged the name.
- Only then look at Search leftovers. De-indexing a list the court still publishes is a waste of a form.
If you want the desk to look at a general question about the process, use contact. Do not send the judgment PDF or a zip of every replica. We publish method. We do not run your case.