Jump Anywhere in a Long Judgment With the Contents Panel

What changed

The full-text reader builds a table of contents from a judgment's internal heading structure, so you can jump between sections rather than scrolling through the entire decision. A bug caused two related problems: section labels in the contents panel sometimes did not match the actual headings in the judgment, and clicking a section could scroll you to a position above or below the section it named. In long judgments — constitutional bench decisions, High Court orders spanning several distinct issues, tribunal decisions with extensive fact-finding — this made the table of contents unreliable at exactly the moments it was most useful.

We corrected how the reader detects and maps a judgment's section structure. The contents panel now reflects the judgment's real headings in the correct order, and clicking any entry takes you to the start of that section. The fix is most noticeable in judgments with deep or irregular heading hierarchies, which are precisely where navigation saves the most time.

How to use it

1. Open any judgment in the Judgments workspace to enter the full-text reader.
2. Open the table of contents panel, which shows the judgment's sections: facts, issues framed, submissions, analysis, conclusion, and any separate concurrences or dissents.
3. Click any section entry to jump directly to the start of that section in the text.
4. Navigate between sections using the panel, or use the back control to return to your previous position.
5. Combine table of contents navigation with citation arrival: if you reach a judgment by clicking a research citation, use the contents panel to move from the cited paragraph to the broader section around it for full context.

Why it matters

Selective reading is a core skill in legal research. You usually know which parts of a decision matter for your question — the issues framed, the court's analysis on a particular point, the ultimate direction, the order — and you do not want to read through everything else to reach them. The table of contents exists to make that selective navigation fast.

A contents panel that labels sections incorrectly or scrolls to the wrong place does more than slow you down — it misdirects you. You click an entry, trust where you land, and start reading, only to realise that the section you needed is several paragraphs further on. In a decision running to a hundred paragraphs or more, identifying that you are in the wrong section and reorienting yourself takes time that accumulates across a research session covering multiple authorities.

Making the table of contents faithfully reflect the actual judgment structure turns it into something you can rely on rather than something you have to verify after each click.

Good to know

• The fix applies across the full corpus of more than 72,000 Supreme Court and High Court judgments, including older decisions with formatting patterns that differ from modern electronic filings.
• It works alongside related judgments: arrive at a case via a citation or search result, use the table of contents to jump to the relevant section, and then open connected decisions from the same reader.
• Only the mapping between the contents panel and the judgment's sections has changed. The judgment text, metadata, and citation resolution are unaffected.
• If a judgment has an internal structure the reader still does not fully capture — some very old printed decisions have irregular heading formats — the full text remains searchable inside the reader.
• The table of contents is generated for every judgment in the corpus that contains detectable section headings.