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Abstract

Many users and/or consumers of law reports grapple with two major questions. The first question revolves around the issue why some judicial decisions are referred to as reported decisions, while others are referred to as unreported decisions. This question therefore deals with the dichotomy between reported judicial decisions and unreported judicial decisions. The second question flows from the first and relates to which categories of decisions appear in law reports (and therefore are classified as ‘reported’) and which ones do not (and therefore are classified as ‘unreported’). Put the other way around, that second question becomes: what are the criteria for selecting the judicial decisions that appear and do not appear in law reports? This article therefore attempts to make a modest contribution to the field of law reporting by providing answers to those two questions. It does so by providing some reflections from the perspective of a practising law reporter based in Kenya. The paper uses various cross-cutting thematic areas to demonstrate why some judicial decisions are reported while others are not. The views provided hereunder are therefore merely an introductory note based on the emerging practices and developments in the field of law reporting in Kenya as used by the National Council for Law Reporting (the official state agency mandated to publish the Kenya Law Reports).

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