CaseSharp for UQ law students

How the degree is structured

• ·LLB (Hons) is four years as a stand-alone degree.
• ·Dual programs run five and a half years.
• ·The JD has been discontinued. UQ is an LLB school.

An undergraduate cohort, all the way through

With the JD discontinued, UQ law is an undergraduate school. Everyone in a first year tutorial is on either a four year LLB (Hons) or a five and a half year dual program, and nobody in the room is a graduate entry student compressing the same content into three years. That changes the pace of a subject in a way people rarely name: the reading is spread over more weeks, most students are carrying units outside law at the same time, and the final year carries the ethics, remedies and capstone work that the standard LLB pattern puts there. It also means the year you are in is a more reliable guide to where you are than it is at a school with a JD, which is the one place on this site where a year of degree is worth much.

Queensland is a Code state

Queensland runs a criminal code rather than the common law of crime, which is the single most important jurisdictional fact for a UQ law student and the one that quietly ruins borrowed study notes. A great deal of published material, including notes swapped between students at different schools and a lot of what a general search turns up, assumes the common law position on elements and defences. For a Queensland problem question, the code provision is the starting point and the case law reads onto it rather than under it. When you are checking authority, filter to the Queensland courts first and treat southern decisions as persuasive context rather than as the answer.

2026 key dates

Dates come from published 2026 university calendars and can change. Your course profile is the one that counts.

Semester 2 teaching runs from 27 July and exams run 2 to 21 November, with the assignment cluster from about early September to mid October. UQ finishes later than the Victorian schools we carry dates for, where exams end 18 and 20 November, so if you are coordinating a break with friends interstate you are the one still sitting papers.

Clerkship applications in this state

Queensland clerkship applications ran 13 July to 7 August 2026. That opens the day after the New South Wales window closed on 12 July, and closes two days before the Victorian window ends on 9 August, so Queensland is not the earliest state timetable in the country: it opens last and finishes second. Semester 2 teaching started 27 July, which means the final week and a half of the application window overlaps the start of semester rather than sitting in the break. Firms set their own dates each year, so check the current guidance rather than 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.

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.

Why a general assistant is the wrong instrument for this

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.

• Criminal Law and Procedure
• Torts
• Contracts
• Property
• Equity and Trusts
• Corporations Law
• Administrative Law
• Constitutional Law
• Civil Procedure
• Evidence
• Ethics and Professional Responsibility

Questions UQ students ask

Is anything here Queensland specific?

The corpus covers federal, state and territory courts, so Queensland decisions are searchable alongside everything else, and you can filter by court and jurisdiction when you need the binding line rather than the interesting one. Criminal Law is the subject where the jurisdiction matters most, because Queensland is a Code state and a lot of published study material assumes the common law position.

Does the Queensland clerkship timetable clash with semester?

Partly. Applications ran 13 July to 7 August 2026 and semester 2 teaching started 27 July, so roughly the last week and a half of the window sits inside teaching. It is a smaller clash than Victoria has, where the window runs to 9 August, and a much smaller one than a UNSW student faces with an August exam block. The common misunderstanding is that Queensland runs earliest of the three states. It does not: New South Wales ran 10 June to 12 July, Victoria 6 July to 9 August, and Queensland opened last of the three.

UQ 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 UQ?

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.

Other law schools

• USYD
• UNSW
• Melbourne
• Monash
• ANU
• Macquarie
• UTS
• QUT
• Deakin