Canberra, Australian Capital Territory · Semesters
CaseSharp for ANU law students
At ANU the LLB (Hons) sits inside the Flexible Double Degree, which typically runs five years, and the JD runs three years with an online mode. ANU Law also publishes some of the clearest guidance in the country on generative AI in assessment, which is worth reading before you use any tool, including this one.
CaseSharp is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Australian National University. Names of universities are used only to describe who a page is written for.
How the degree is structured
- LLB (Hons) sits inside the Flexible Double Degree, typically five years.
- The JD is three years and includes an online mode.
- Canberra puts you next to the High Court and the federal courts, which shows up in electives and clinical options.
The Flexible Double Degree, and what it does to sequencing
The ANU LLB (Hons) is delivered inside the Flexible Double Degree rather than as a stand-alone program, and five years is the typical length. The flexibility is real, and it has a cost: because you assemble the second half of the degree yourself, the order in which you meet the Priestley subjects is less fixed than it is at a school with a single prescribed sequence. Two students in the same year can be in very different subjects, which makes year-based study groups less useful and subject-based ones more useful. It is also why nothing on this site is keyed to a year of degree. Pick the subjects you are enrolled in this semester and work from those.
The JD online mode
The ANU JD includes an online mode, which is unusual for a Go8 law school and changes the shape of a study week rather than its content. The semester dates are the same, the assessment is the same, and the reading is the same, but nobody is going to notice you have fallen two weeks behind. On campus that gets caught by a tutorial you have to speak in; online it compounds quietly until a problem question is due. The habit that substitutes for the tutorial is a weekly briefing routine you actually keep, and a check on the authorities in your notes before you rely on them rather than after a marker does.
2026 key dates
| Period | 2026 |
|---|---|
| Semester 1 orientation | 16 to 20 February 2026 |
| Semester 1 teaching | From 23 February 2026 |
| Semester 1 exams | From 4 June 2026 |
| Semester 2 orientation | 20 to 24 July 2026 |
| Semester 2 teaching | From 27 July 2026 |
| Semester 2 exams | From 5 November 2026 |
Dates come from published 2026 university calendars and can change. Your course outline is the one that counts.
Semester 2 orientation ran 20 to 24 July with teaching from 27 July, and exams start from 5 November, which puts the assignment cluster in early September to mid October. If you are studying the JD online, the same dates apply but the reading has to be self-paced, so a weekly briefing habit matters more than a study week.
Clerkship applications in this state
The research this page is built from carries 2026 clerkship windows for New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, and none for the Australian Capital Territory. Since ANU students commonly apply interstate, those are usually the dates that matter: New South Wales ran 10 June to 12 July, Victoria 6 July to 9 August, and Queensland 13 July to 7 August. For ACT firms, federal government graduate programs and court associateships, which are a larger share of the ANU picture than they are anywhere else, the timetables are separate and are not published here. Check the ANU careers service and the relevant law society rather than a date on this page.
Clerkship windows differ by state and move each year. For 2026 the published windows were 10 June to 12 July in New South Wales, 6 July to 9 August in Victoria, and 13 July to 7 August in Queensland.
What your university library gives you access to
Before you pay for anything, use what you already have. Your university library has already funded research databases for you, and there are good free ones you can reach on top of them. This section is about what you can already get to as a student. It is not a statement about where CaseSharp's material comes from.
Lexis+ AU and Westlaw AU
Your university library gives you access to both while you are enrolled, at no cost to you. They are practitioner research platforms with authorised report series, deep commentary and mature citators, CaseBase and FirstPoint. They are deeper than CaseSharp on commentary and reported series, and learning to use them properly is part of the degree. Library access is usually the first thing your law school teaches you.
AustLII
You do not need a library login for this one. AustLII is free to everyone, supported by donations, and your library guide will point you at it anyway. A great deal of Australian material is publicly readable there, including older tribunal decisions and anything handed down since the CaseSharp coverage date, and on the open web an AustLII link is often the citation of record.
Jade and JADE Professional
Jade has a free registered tier anyone can sign up for, and JADE Professional is available free to law students with a university email address. Arrangements vary by institution, so check what your library lists before you assume you have it. It is a fast, well-liked lookup and citator tool, and it costs students nothing.
CaseSharp is not a substitute for any of that, and anyone telling you otherwise has not used them properly.
Where CaseSharp fits alongside them
It sits in a narrower gap: the ten minutes before a tutorial, the night a problem question is due, and the week you are compressing a semester into a scaffold. Four things specifically.
Speed
Ask a question the way you would ask a tutor and get an answer in plain English with the authorities attached, rather than building a search string first.
Briefs
Any judgment becomes an IRAC brief: material facts, issue, rule, application and what was held, each part linked back to the paragraph it came from.
AGLC4
Full form and short form with pinpoints, ready to paste into footnotes, flagged for manual review when a reference cannot be parsed rather than guessed at.
Verification
Every claim in an answer links to the paragraph it came from, the citation graph shows which cases cite an authority and which it cites, ranked by influence, and Sharp says when it cannot find authority instead of inventing a case.
73,000 audited Australian decisions, current to the end of April 2026. Judgments handed down after that date are not in the corpus yet, so for anything very recent, check AustLII or your library database as well.
Your law school sets the rules, not us
Australian law schools treat undisclosed AI use as academic misconduct, and a finding has to be disclosed to the admissions board when you apply to be admitted. The rules are set by your university and often by the individual subject convenor, so check the policy for each assessment and disclose where your subject requires it. CaseSharp is a research and study tool. It does not write assignments, and every substantive output carries a human-review notice.
ANU Law guidance is the clearest published example of the rule set that applies in some form at every Australian law school. Read the policy for each assessment, and disclose where your course requires it.
Subject packs
Pick the Priestley subjects you are enrolled in this semester. Each page covers what the subject includes, cases you are likely to meet, and how to use CaseSharp for that subject's assessments.
Questions ANU students ask
- What does ANU say about using AI in assessment?
- ANU Law publishes guidance for students on generative AI in assessment. In short: submitting undisclosed AI content breaches the Academic Integrity Rule 2021, a finding has to be disclosed to the legal admissions authority, and where AI use is permitted a disclosure footnote is required. The default position varies by course convenor and by assessment, so the policy for each individual assessment is the one to read. CaseSharp is a research and study tool, not a writing service, but that does not make the policy question go away.
- Does studying the JD online change what I should do differently?
- The dates and the assessment do not change. What changes is that the informal checking which happens on campus stops happening: nobody notices you skipped the reading, no corridor conversation corrects a misunderstanding, and no study group forms by accident. The substitutes are deliberate rather than incidental. Brief the cases in the week they are set, check the authorities in your notes before you build a scaffold on them, and read the AI policy for each assessment yourself rather than relying on what someone in a group chat says the rule is.
- ANU already gives me Lexis+ AU and Westlaw AU for free. Why would I pay for this?
- Because they are excellent at a different job. Lexis+ AU and Westlaw AU are practitioner research platforms with deep commentary, authorised reports and mature citators, and if you need those, use them, they are already paid for. They were not built to brief a case for a tutorial, format AGLC4 footnotes, check the citing cases behind a scaffold, or work in the ten minutes before class. That is what CaseSharp is for, and most students who pay for it keep using their library databases too.
- What happens to my access when I finish at ANU?
- Your university logins stop working, usually within weeks of your final result, and the databases you spent years learning go with them. A CaseSharp account belongs to you rather than to the institution: everything you saved stays, and the free plan does not expire. That is worth knowing before your final semester rather than after it.
CaseSharp is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Australian National University. Names of universities are used only to describe who a page is written for.