Further to my last post, I have located another 9 freely available volumes of the English Reports. The bibliography is now missing volumes 42, 68, 74, 83, 101, 112, 117, 127 and 165, due to Google, Hathi Trust and Internet Archive not having digital copies; volumes 170 to 176 are missing as although Google have copies, the full text is not being made available, presumably due to copyright issues. In all, just 16 volumes, around 9%, are absent from the full set of 178 books.
I have also adapted the table of the reports archived in the Wayback Machine, to include links to the individual volumes. This provides a convenient way of locating material by original publication, and by the abbreviations generally used to refer to them.
Update, 11 May 2021: As pointed out in the comments, Common LII hold a full set of the Engish Reports, broken down into single PDFs. I don’t find their database particularly easy to search or browse, though: some reports appear misfiled under the wrong date, and the PDFs often have fragments of other cases included, which means searching often throws up false positives. The OCR, as ever, also leaves something to be desired. Nevertheless, it is the most convenient, complete and openly accessible set available.
While they are sorted by year rather than volume the whole of the English Reports are available at the following link and may be of interest to you. They are hidden away and might not be easily found – commonlii.org/uk/cases/EngR/
Unfortunately, Common LII sorted the cases by the year of publication of the edition of the nominate reporters the E.R. editors chose for inclusion.
As far as it goes, I’ve begun scraping CLII and turning their numerous files into compiled editions. So far, I’ve uploaded all of vols. 1-11 and 72-80 to Wikisource for transcription. It’s a slow process, as I can’t automate the steps I have to take in Acrobat. The portal page at Wikisource is here for anyone interested: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Portal:The_English_Reports
Great work, this is very useful.
Are you doing all the volumes from the CLII set, or just those missing from the Google digitizations?
My goal is to do all the volumes (and even to translate the cases in law-French and Latin into English). As of today, it is my belief that only volumes 177 and 178 (the indices for the entire series) is still susceptible to being copyright claimed, but with Google’s crawlers constantly updating their search results with respect to what’s on the Wikimedia Foundation’s sites, I’d think those two volumes aren’t really necessary. Again, with the fact that I can’t automate the Adobe Acrobat steps, that’s the bottleneck on my end with respect to getting the compiled editions uploaded.
That’s an ambitious goal! The two index vols don’t have any author, and are over 70 years old, so I believe they are in the public domain. (Google certainly thinks so, as they released the volumes after I requested them.)
I think all the vols are PD given that they are compilations of old books, though Google disagreed when I requested some of the later ones.
I am hoping to run the whole set through OCR at some point, but lack the time right now, and need to rejig my OCR set up.
This is why I’ve been uploading the scans to Wikisource. They have a built-in OCR (when you create a page, there’s an OCR transcription button toward the top right). Generally, it does really well; it only seems to struggle with the shorthand/abbreviations of the earliest reporters.
I find Wikisource’s own OCR poor for c18th texts (such as the Ruffhead series); I haven’t looked at its performance with modern fonts, which the English Reports are in; presumably that’s much better. I also prefer to be able to tweak settings according to the specific volume, and run scripts on the text to locate and correct errors. Hence I prefer to do OCR on my own machine. I hope at some point the Wikisource interface will allow for bulk uploads, downloads and corrections.
I’ve just checked Wikisource’s own OCR on a modern volume:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:The_Public_General_Acts_of_the_United_Kingdom_1973_Vol_1.pdf/116
Something has clearly gone wrong here. I’ll raise it in the Scriptorium.
Contact me for vol 165