Court Records in South Australia: How to Search, Inspect and Access Court Files

South Australia's Uniform Civil Rules 2020 rule 13.10 sets the Registrar's search and inspection procedure, but the actual right to inspect a Supreme, District, Magistrates or Environment, Resources and Development Court file comes from each court's own Act, and a search or inspection request currently costs $30.75.

Which South Australian Court Holds What

For an overview of how court records access works across every state and territory, see court records in Australia.

South Australia's courts share one administrative body, the Courts Administration Authority, which runs the registries, case lists and fee schedules for the Supreme Court of South Australia (its General Division and the Court of Appeal, created by the 2016 Court of Appeal reforms, sit inside the one Supreme Court registry structure), the District Court, the Magistrates Court (Adelaide plus suburban and regional locations), the Youth Court, the Environment, Resources and Development Court, the Coroners Court, and the Wardens Court. Each court has its own registry under that umbrella, and the Coroners Court registry specifically holds inquest files and findings.

The South Australian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, SACAT, is not part of this court family. It runs its own separate website and registry, and it does not appear on the Authority's own list of courts. SACAT is a tribunal, with jurisdiction over tenancy, guardianship and administration, mental health, advance care directives and reviews of certain government decisions, among other matters, and it should be treated as a separate access channel rather than a division of the Authority's main portal, CourtSA.

Searching Online Through CourtSA

CourtSA is the Authority's one online portal, used for lodging and defending criminal, civil and probate cases, for a case-list search, for accessing case documents and notifications, for viewing orders and judgments, and for ordering transcripts of Supreme, District, Environment, Resources and Development, or Coroners Court proceedings. The portal's welcome page pushes every visitor toward creating an account before showing case-search results, and it does not itself state whether a basic case-list or party-name search is free without one. What is confirmed is the fee for a formal search-and-inspect request, covered below; whether CourtSA's own search screen has a free public tier short of that formal request is not settled by the portal's public pages, so treat it as an open question rather than an assumption either way.

Daily court lists sit on a separate part of the Authority's site, split by court and list type: all criminal cases, all civil cases, a warning list, and dedicated lists for the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal, the District Court's civil and criminal divisions, and the Adelaide Magistrates Court's civil and criminal divisions.

Inspecting a Court File: The Rule, Who May Apply, and the Fee

Uniform Civil Rules 2020 rule 13.10 is the number most often quoted for South Australia's access rule, but it is a procedural rule, not the source of the access right itself. It requires the Registrar to set practices for what information is accessible to parties, lawyers, members of the public or other classes of person, and for how someone requests access or copies, including any fee. The compiled Rules print an explanatory note pointing to where the real, substantive access right lives: section 131 of the Supreme Court Act 1935, section 54 of the District Court Act 1991, section 51 of the Magistrates Court Act 1991, and section 47 of the Environment, Resources and Development Court Act 1993. Each of those sections follows the same two-part pattern. Section 131(1) of the Supreme Court Act, for example, requires the court, on application by any member of the public, to allow inspection or copying of listed material including process, transcripts of evidence and judgments or orders, while section 131(2) allows material not taken or received in open court, suppressed material and regulation-prescribed classes to be inspected only with the court's permission; section 131(5) lets the court charge a regulated fee.

A search or inspection of a court record currently costs $30.75, the same figure on both the Supreme Court's and the Magistrates Court's fee schedules, as at 1 July 2026.

The Supreme Court's own fee schedule states that no fee applies to a criminal-proceedings search request made by, or on behalf of, a defendant or a crime victim.

Judgments and Daily Lists

South Australian judgments are published on two channels. The Authority's own judgments page carries downloadable copies of recent judgments from the Supreme Court (including the Court of Appeal), the District Court and the Environment, Resources and Development Court, and the page itself directs readers to AustLII for the fuller historical archive; how far back AustLII's South Australian coverage runs, or how it compares in currency, was not independently confirmed in researching this page. Sentencing remarks and Coroners Court findings are published as their own separate feeds on the same site, not folded into the general judgments page. The judgments page does not state a publication lag, describing itself only as carrying recent judgments handed down in court.

Suppression and Non-Publication Orders

Evidence Act 1929 section 69A gives the Court a discretionary power to clear the courtroom or suppress publication of evidence, names or other identifying material, with a right of review under section 69AB and a right of appeal under section 69AC. Breaching a suppression order made under this Division is an offence under section 70, carrying a maximum penalty of $10,000 or 2 years' imprisonment for a natural person and $120,000 for a body corporate.

This discretionary suppression power is separate from a standing statutory restriction in the same Act: section 71A restricts reporting on sexual offences generally, protecting a complainant's identity by force of the statute itself rather than by a case-by-case court order. The two provisions cover related but distinct territory and should not be cited as if they were the same rule.

Records Closed by Default

A young person's identity in Youth Court proceedings is protected by the Young Offenders Act 1993 section 13, which stops a report from identifying, or being likely to lead to the identification of, a youth involved in Youth Court proceedings, or a victim, without consent. This is a different Act from the Youth Court Act 1993, whose section 24 governs only who may physically be present in the courtroom, and which actually permits a genuine representative of the news media to attend proceedings involving an alleged offence. The two Acts are easy to conflate but do different jobs.

Sexual-offence complainant identification is covered above, under Evidence Act 1929 section 71A.

Adoption proceedings are closed by default under the Adoption Act 1988. Section 24 states that adoption applications cannot be heard in open court, and that court records of adoption proceedings are not open to public inspection except as the Court authorises. Section 36 separately restricts anyone administering the Act from disclosing information about an adopted person or their birth or adoptive parents, subject to narrow exceptions, with a maximum penalty of $10,000 under section 36.

Family law matters, including divorce, parenting arrangements and property division under the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth), are federal jurisdiction, heard by the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, not any South Australian state court. See family court process in Australia for how that federal process works.

South Australia's own Freedom of Information Act 1991 does not reach a court's judicial functions. Section 6 provides that neither a court nor a judicial officer is regarded as an agency for the Act's purposes when acting judicially, and Schedule 1 separately exempts any document that relates to a court's judicial functions. Freedom of information law is not a channel for reaching a court file.

What a South Australian Court Record Is Not

A court record is not a criminal history check. A police check is a police-held summary of a person's conviction history, filtered by South Australia's own Spent Convictions Act 2009 (the lowest spent-conviction threshold in Australia, at 12 months for an adult sentence) and by the Commonwealth's Crimes Act 1914 Part VIIC scheme; a court's own file, and a published judgment, are not affected by a conviction later becoming spent. See the background checks hub, national police check in Australia, and police check in South Australia for how that separate system works, and spent convictions in South Australia for the spent-conviction rules themselves.

A court record is also not a birth, death or marriage certificate. Those sit with South Australia's registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, covered on the vital records hub, not with the courts.