Case in Point: Research examples from the Law Library

What date did s80A of the Building Act 1993 commence?

There are a few different methods for finding out when a section within a Victorian Act commenced. The Act itself will tell you but requires a bit of sleuthing. The cheat method is to use Lawlex. Let’s look at both.

Our requestor wanted to know the commencement date of a section inserted into an existing Act. That is, the Act had already been around for a while, and was subsequently amended to include a new section.

How did we know it was an insertion? Because the Act itself tells us. ?

The Sleuth

This method requires you to go to the free Victorian government legislation website and browse or search for the Act.

Open the Act and find the section you want to know about – we’re looking for the Building Act 1993, s80A.

Victorian Acts include amendment details in the margins alongside the section it relates to. For s80A, it had the following margin note:

S. 80A inserted by No. 21/2017 s. 6

The next step is to mosey on down to the EndNotes of the Act (scroll to the end) to look up Act number 21 of 2017 and see when s6 commenced. This will also be the commencement date for s80A.

The Endnotes for this Act contains a big table of amendments, but they are in year order, so its just a matter of scrolling until we get to 2017, and from there it’s easy to spot Act 21.

It tells us s6, which we know inserted s80A, commenced 1 July 2018.

The Cheat

The cheat method for finding a commencement date is to use Lawlex. Lawlex is free, but it does have premium research features (such as the amendment table) that require a subscription.

If you are onsite at the Supreme Court Library, you can access the premium features for free.

Using the search box set to Victoria, bring up the Building Act 1993. Select ‘View history of amendments to this title’ under ‘Lawlex Premium Research’.

There are over 2,000 amendments listed, which is a lot to scroll through, so try using the keyboard shortcut ‘ctrl+f’ (its ‘ctrl+command' on Apple) to search on 80A.

The great thing about Lawlex is that you can sort the table in different ways to find the information you need (use the 'Sort by' dropdown at the top).

There are a few entries for s80A, but we're looking for the insertion (indicated in the ‘How affected’ column by the letter I).

It confirms s80A was inserted by Act 21/2017, s6, commencing 1 July 2018, all within the table (no further clicking or searching required).

And that’s how we found out when s80A of the Building Act 1993 (Vic) commenced.