AustLII

The Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) is the free, go-to home for Australian law, run jointly by the law faculties of UTS and UNSW. It holds decades of case law from every Australian jurisdiction, with comprehensive coverage from 1995 onwards, alongside consolidated legislation, regulations, law reform reports, and legal scholarship. Judgments use medium-neutral citation, meaning each one has a stable reference (like [2020] HCA 5) that does not depend on a commercial publisher's page numbers, which gives you reliable, unchanging anchors for retrieval and cross-referencing.

You access it through the website, where you can browse by jurisdiction and court or run full-text searches across the collection. There is no official bulk-download API or dataset export, so building a RAG index means fetching the HTML judgment pages you need and extracting the text yourself. Be considerate about it: crawl slowly, respect the site's robots rules, and cache locally rather than hammering the servers, because AustLII is a not-for-profit running on limited resources. Judgments are broadly consistent in structure, which helps when you split them into headnote, facts, reasoning, and orders for chunking.

AustLII is best for any RAG project grounded in Australian law: a research assistant for practitioners, a tool that summarises or compares judgments, or a citation-checker. Its breadth across state and federal courts in one place is hard to match.

The caveat that matters most is licensing. Free to read is not the same as free to reuse. AustLII's terms grant open access, not an open reuse licence, so they do not give you a blanket right to redistribute the full collection or build a commercial product on top of it. Review the terms and, for anything commercial, seek permission before harvesting in bulk. It sits alongside BAILII for the UK and CourtListener for the US as a national free-law service; like BAILII, treat it as readable-but-restricted rather than openly licensed.