Cathie.best

Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site's contact form.

Governing from the Bench: The Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Role
Emmett Macfarlane
Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012

(NB. As before, the UBC Press offers Slaw readers a discount on the price. The code is SLAW-20, and the offer will expire July 15, 2013)

(Excerpt selected by the author.)

In Governing from the Bench: The Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Role (UBC Press, 2013) I attempt to provide a comprehensive look inside the Supreme Court. The book explores each stage of the Court’s decision-making process, from selecting which cases to hear to the negotiation and compromise the justices engage in when writing their reasons. This short excerpt examines the role and influence the Court’s law clerks have on the writing process.

—

There is no uniform approach among the justices with regard to how they prepare drafts of written reasons. Some of the Court’s members will prepare a simple outline of the reasoning explored in conference. Others will go through the case materials and begin work on a substantial rough draft. Regardless of the starting point, most judgments go through several drafts before they are circulated to the rest of the Court, and are then subjected to even more revisions after that. Each justice also varies in the extent to which she relies on her law clerks, and even this can vary from case to case. One thing is especially clear: the law clerks’ involvement in the preparation of reasons is substantial, ranging from assisting in editing and additional research to writing full drafts of the reasons themselves. Typically, the clerk that prepares the bench memoranda for a particular case will be the clerk assigned to work on the judgment.

One justice suggests that the two primary aspects of the clerks’ relationship with the judge are professional and educational. The professional relationship ensures the justice understands all aspects of the case through the clerk’s research and assistance. In the educational aspect of the relationship, the judge tries to give the clerks as much exposure to the judicial process and all areas of the law during their year of service. With this view in mind, this justice allows the clerks to participate in all aspects of handling a case, including working on the drafting of the reasons. When assigned writing responsibilities for a case, the justice prepares an outline following the conference discussion for the clerk to follow when the clerk is working on the reasons.

Another justice follows every conference by writing a memo of a page or two in length, describing what was discussed, what the consensus was and why, and the key issues or problems of the case. This justice notes that “through these years, I’ve written the majority of the first drafts of my own reasons. If I’m assigned to write the reasons, I have habits going back to college – I write an outline of the reasons, I almost never start cold.” Occasionally this justice will have clerks prepare a first draft. In these instances the clerk “has this outline that I discuss with him. If I do it myself, I start writing after doing my research, asking sometimes my clerk for a summation of research.”

A third justice notes relying “a great deal” on the clerks. “My philosophy was that the essential role of the judge, for which he can’t be replaced or substituted, is judging. The rest, he can get assistance.” This includes both research and writing. “Our clerks are the cream of the crop from the law faculties across the country. They have good minds, therefore, they research intelligently and understand [how] the judge is thinking.” The real substantive thinking remains the purview of the justice. One of the key reasons for including the clerks so thoroughly in the process is efficiency. “You have to be mindful that each judge has three clerks, and he’s dealing with cases that were worked on by each one of the three law clerks.”

A fourth justice is even more effusive about the importance of the clerks’ work. “You can have a wonderful exchange with these young people.” In some respects, the clerks are “much more knowledgeable” than justices, because they are just out of law school and have received training on constitutional issues and the Charter. Describing the clerks as a “great resource,” this justice notes initially avoiding having clerks write drafts, but over time deciding it could be fruitful. “I thought it was good for them to be able to sit in ‘my chair’,” the justice explains, adding that the clerks’ writing can produce interesting things for discussion and contemplation.

Some commentators suggest the law clerks’ activity is important, not only because their research and intellectual contributions reflect the fact that the Court has evolved into a more full-fledged policymaking institution, but also because they have a high degree of influence on case outcomes. F.L. Morton and Rainer Knopff write, for example, that “in effect, the clerks function as a filter between what comes into the court (factums) and what goes out (written judgments). Lawyers can no longer assume that the judges have actually read their factums, as opposed to selective summaries prepared by the clerks.”[1] The justices and law clerks interviewed for this study assert that the justices look at all of the relevant material for each case. Yet Morton and Knopff’s assertion that the “rapid growth in the number of functions of the clerks has effected a devolution of power from the top (judges) to the middle (clerks) of the bureaucratic pyramid”[2] is worth examining. While it is obvious the justices retain the final say in the outcome of a case, the process of research and writing undertaken by the clerks may help shape the judgments in a fundamental way. By choosing to frame issues in a particular manner in the course of writing the first draft, or by introducing or emphasizing particular research on a given issue, the clerks wield tremendous power. Most of the clerks are modest about the extent of their influence, although a couple of the clerks I interviewed say they were surprised at how much power they had. One clerk notes that there were justices who would give surprisingly little instruction, telling their clerks “I want to find for the appellant, go write the first draft.” Says the clerk, “that’s an extraordinary amount of power to give somebody who just graduated from law school.”

Most of the justices also acknowledge that clerks do have significant influence. This extends from bringing better wording to reasons or strengthening the research – and therefore the justifications – of a given decision to developing arguments or bringing new ideas to the logic of a decision. The strength of the clerks’ influence, however, no doubt depends on which justice they work with. Dickson worked very closely with his clerks. His biographers describe in detail the impact they had on important cases, including the development of what would become the Court’s approach to the Charter’s reasonable limits clause in the Oakes case. Dickson had in depth discussions with his clerks, using them as sounding boards for ideas and encouraging them to challenge his ideas. He also gave his clerks great leeway in advocating for particular outcomes. His private papers relating to the labour trilogy show that “his drafts and memoranda to and from his law clerks suggest that the matter was one of lively debate in his chambers and the issue remained unresolved in his mind for some time.”[3] As a result, his biographers conclude that in important, ground-breaking judgments he was more influenced by his clerks than by the arguments of counsel.

For Wilson, similar participation of her clerks was indispensable. She told the clerks “We want your views … Don’t be shy. Don’t be modest. If you disagree with us, say so. If you think we’ve missed the point, say so. This is one of your most important functions – to be a critic and a sounding board for your judge. Through argument and discussion and debate our thinking is refined and our insights sharpened. We try to do this with our colleagues but it’s not always possible. So we rely on you.”[4]

This is not the case with some of the other justices. One justice I interviewed specifically tells the clerks at the start of each year that they “are not there to be advocates.” As noted above, the experiences of the clerks vary quite widely. Some of the clerks describe their function primarily as that of research assistants and a couple of them state that they had relatively little face-to-face contact with their judge. Even some of those clerks who regularly draft decisions would not challenge their justice’s reasoning in the way Wilson encouraged. One says, “I guess I wouldn’t have seen it as appropriate for clerks to be seeking to influence their judge, I always saw my role to respond to what my judge wanted. But there would be other clerks who have different perspectives on that and may have been more ready to try to convince a judge to their point of view.” Simply put, some justices do not foster a type of relationship with their clerks that permits the clerks significant input on case decisions. Finally, it is worth recalling that there is no question as to who has the final say. One clerk sums it up nicely by remarking that “there were several cases where clerks were researching reasons, and the nine clerks who worked on the case came to one conclusion and the nine justices on that case came to an opposite conclusion.”

CanLII has added “See Also” references! No, I am not talking about references within CanLII to other things on CanLII, like the growing Commentary section on the site.  In this case, I mean See Also references to case comments linked to outside sources as in the image below for Sumner v PCL Constructors Inc., 2011 ABCA 326 (CanLII),
http://canlii.ca/t/fnws8.

 

Commercial services like Westlaw Canada and LexisNexis Quicklaw offer excellent lists of case commentary in their noting up services. This is a new feature for CanLII. I like the way that it links out to the web.

The Law Library of Congress has updated the user interface of its Legal Blawg Archive.

Since about 2007, the Library has been collecting snapshots of select legal blawgs on a monthly basis. The vast majority are American but there are a few Canadian blawgs, including Slaw.ca.

As explained in a post yesterday in In Custodia Legis, the Law Library of Congress blog, the changes include:

"(1) thumbnail images for each of the archived blogs, which are embedded into both the results list and the individual item records; (2) faceted search options on the left-hand side of the results list, which allow search results to be narrowed by the year of the web capture, the specific legal subject of the blog, and the state/country/continent of origin for the blog; and (3) individual item records that include all web captures for blogs that have had changes in their URLs."

Kara Ann Noel, JD, MLIS, of the University of Washington, has posted The Unbundling of Legal Services and its Implications for Law Librarianship.

Here is the abstract:

This paper addresses the role of law libraries with respect to online sites that give free or low-cost legal advice. In this paper, I will argue that the gap in access to legal services for the lower and middle class needs addressing, and that the public law librarian’s role in facilitating access to justice can be improved by helping pro se patrons access the growing number of free or nominal cost online legal advice resources. The rise in online legal advice sites comes with concerns from the legal profession regarding the possible ethical duties and responsibilities of giving legal advice in a new medium, and the role of the law librarian in referring people to these services is constrained by the values of law librarian’s professional ethics. These concerns are valid and warrant serious consideration, yet they are only beginning to be addressed by the profession. I will argue that as the ethical concerns stemming from the proliferation of online legal advice sites are addressed, regulated, and managed by the legal profession, public law librarians should not ignore their presence but embrace their potential role in facilitating access to the information available to patrons in a new technological medium.

Filed under: Articles and papers, Policy debates Tagged: Ethical issues for law librarians regarding unbundled legal services, Ethics of law librarians, Ethics of law librarianship, Kara Ann Noel, Kara Noel, Law librarianship, Legal ethics, Unbundled legal services, Unbundling of legal services

Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org has recently raised the issue of whether legal citation standards should be copyrighted, in a letter to the Dean of Harvard Law School.

One of the principal U.S. legal citation standards, The Bluebook, is copyrighted, and access to it is available only for a fee. Copyright in The Bluebook appears to be owned by an organization with links to four major U.S. law schools, including Harvard Law School. Carl opposes copyright in legal citation standards, has digitized The Bluebook, and earlier this month sent his digitized copy (on a thumbdrive) with a letter asking that The Bluebook be made freely available on the Web, to the Dean of Harvard Law School.

Carl has posted a short section of his open version of The Bluebook online, and has posted some files for developers, about which I hope to have more details shortly.

You can follow this story by following Carl’s tweets at @carlmalamud

For more information on this story, please see Cory Doctorow’s post.

For more information on copyright in legal citation standards, please see:

• Ivan Mokanov’s VoxPopuLII post on Canada’s neutral citation;
• Courtney Minick’s VoxPopuLII post on universal citation for state codes;
• Frank Bennett’s VoxPopuLII post on CSL and legal citation

Filed under: Policy debates, Standards Tagged: Bluebook, Carl Malamud, Copyright in legal citation standards, Courtney Minick, Frank Bennett, Harvard Bluebook, Ivan Mokanov, Legal Bluebook, Legal citation standards, Public.Resource.Org, Zotero for law, Zotero4Law

Though sifting through weighty tomes of historical ordinances is sometimes an inevitable part of legislative research, it doesn’t always have to be! Here at CLBC, we have a number of resources that will help you navigate murky legislative waters right from your desktop. 

BC & Federal Proclamations

Wondering if a new act is in force? Our BC Proclamations and Federal Proclamations pages contain cumulative lists of proclamations bringing acts into force, updated weekly. 

Subject Guides

Our Guides page includes general BC Legislation and Federal Legislation guides, the Court Rules Amendment Tracker to help with the difficult business of tracing back court rules, and guides for specific acts such as the Family Law Act, the Limitation Act, and the Wills, Estates and Succession Act. 

Asked & Answered Database
When a client asks a particularly complex question, we often post the answer in our Asked & Answered database to save both our clients and ourselves from having to do the work again. Some BC specific legislative examples include:  

• Where Can I Find Pre-1958 BC Regulations? 
• When Did the Revised Statutes of BC Come Into Force? 
• Orders in Council (BC) – Obtaining Copies 
• How Can I Tell if an Act is in Force? 
• How Can I Find the Bill Number of a BC Act? 
• Is It Illegal to Kill a Sasquatch in BC? 
• Which English Acts Are Applicable in BC? 
• What Is Unique About the Revised Statutes of British Columbia, 1911, Vol. IV? 
• Were Any Acts Renamed in the Revised Statutes of British Columbia, 1979? 

Tricky Legislation Stream Posts
The Stream often features helpful legislation posts

from one of our resident experts, Tracy. These posts generally provide an overview of a particularly tricky piece of legislation with information about: the impact of the act, whether it is in force, if there is any supporting documentation, and how to cite the legislation. Some recent posts include:

• The Citizen’s Arrest and Self-Defence Act 
• Will There Be Another General Revision of the Statutes of British Columbia? 
• Tricky Legislation: Changes to Employment Insurance 

Lawyers’ Reading Room: HeinOnline
Both the Annual and Revised Statutes of Canada are available from your desktop through HeinOnline in the Lawyers’ Reading Room. These are not electronic text documents, but rather, the official print versions scanned to PDF.

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I'm offering is the truth - nothing more.

- The Matrix (1999)

Neo ate the red pill and saw the Matrix for himself. A cascading overlay of information that, to his brain, revealed more about his reality than could the construct he had experienced his whole life. 

Now, and I know it's a real stretch to apply this to legal research, let's say that while we may want to believe that lists of cases and citations is all we should expect from a legal research website, we secretly expect there could be a better way. So you take the red pill, visit www.ravellaw.com, type in your query, and instead of a list of cases it gave you a web-work of dots and circles suspended in a grid. You read barely a single word or digit from the screen, but you didn't need to. You saw the Matrix. You've found that seminal US Supreme Court case from three decades back, plus you can literally see from the web of lines that connect it to circles further forward in time that the case is still widely cited in Circuit Courts today. What's more, if you'd told yourself you'd spend a minute researching "jury misconduct" cases from the United States, you'd still have 50 seconds to spare. I guess that's like your version of bullet time. 

The website, and the red pill in this scenario, is www.ravellaw.com, a legal research website spun out of Stanford Law School just last year. I first heard about it from Richard Granat via David Bilinsky's blog in late 2012 when predictions for 2013 were featured. Now that the future has arrived, try it out and see if you're not similarly impressed by the way Ravel presents information. Ravel's interface is stripped down, with a single Googlesque search box (or to be faithful to Canada, and Canadian law search engines in particular, CanLII-Beta-esque). And instead of just a list of cases (though to be clear, there is also a list of results that you can read), Ravel presents a visual map. The X axis of the map represents time. The Y axis represents either level of court or relevance of results depending on the view. Some of the dots and circles are connected by lines, indicating when one case discusses the other. The fatter the line, the more in-depth the discussion. A larger circle always represents a more significant case—mathematically at least, and based on its interconnection with other cases. The last thing you notice is the standard list of results at right, with links to clean copies of each case. 

The whole package is generated by the patent-pending software which powers Ravel. And it's a package that brings to mind a tidy little saying I found on another legal research start up's website, (www.judicata.com has yet to launch, but will presumably offer its own brand of wow later this year). "Legal research isn't just about finding needles; it's about understanding the haystack too." A well-designed information tool should improve cognition of the information. To me, and I'm obviously not alone, data visualization assists with understanding messy heaps of information.

For all this, law is a bit stodgy, lawyers hardly expect something will be better just because it is newer, and the profession is inherently skeptical—skepticism being the consistently highest scoring trait among lawyers, averaging around the 90th percentile. Infographics may be a "fun" way to present relationships between datasets (e.g., comparing the appearance of "security" versus "liberty" in literature over time, or even showing trends in law), there may be resistance to see this as anything more than a novelty. But the brain's ability to assimilate data quickly through graphics is much more than a gimmick. Pilots and radar operators rely on visual aids (artificial horizons, plan position indicators, etc.). They would be miffed if the visual instrumentation that help keep us all aloft and at safe distance from other hard objects were replaced by confounding tables of flight attitude data, electromagnetic backscatter jibber-jabber, etc. Ravel brings the logic of information design to the legal information sphere. It's probably a logic that will catch on and it's an idea that can only be refined to be even more pleasing to the brain. 

For now, Ravel's big limitation, you will no doubt find, is that it only contains judgments from the US Supreme Court and the Courts of Appeals for the 13 circuits. Still, the technology it's built upon is pretty intriguing, even if it is in Beta mode, and it appears to offer other features like the ability to highlight and annotate cases when you're logged in. At the time of writing, the annotation feature was fiercely buggy and had a very half-finished feel. It may be that the more social side of Ravel is only partway through development, but once account profiles and user content is fully enabled, it could be positioned as a hub for crowd-sourced commentary on caselaw. It already appears to be building itself with the hook-ups for other social media account integration (Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn).

I look forward to seeing how deep the rabbit hole goes and whether Ravel's approach will force the big players, Lexis Nexis and Westlaw, to change it up. But as a fan of free information, what I would really love to see is how an already excellent tool like CanLII (which has a much more comprehensive scope of legal information) could be improved by studying what Ravel is doing. If I could, I would go to CanLII today, sign up for a user account, view the seminal and influential cases at a glance, and start annotating them along with legislation, court rules, you name it. But then, I've already taken the red pill.

This is just a quick note to let you know that I've updated my Canadian Law Blogs Search Engine, a Google custom search engine that queries all the Canadian law blogs as listed at Stem Legal's Lawblogs.ca. (You can also access the search engine in Slaw's footer from any Slaw page.) As of June 26, 2013 there were 461 blogs in the database to be searched.

Unfortunately, it seems it's no longer possible to rank or confine the search results of a Google CSE by date, though I'm continuing to look for ways to do that.

When it comes to Google Reader, the world is pretty much divided into two camps.

There are the power-users, for whom this soon-to-be-expired RSS service has long been an indispensable lifeline to the news of the day. And then there is the rest of the world, known primarily (in this regard) for uttering bewildered phrases like “what’s Google Reader?”

I suspect that a disproportionately high percentage of SlawTips readers, being so unusually sophisticated, informed, curious (and unabashedly good looking), will fall into the first camp – legal-information junkies who can’t imagine the world after the Black Monday ahead when Google will pull the plug on Reader and lay it forever to rest.

So where shall we go on July 1 to find our vital law blog updates, breaking legal news, Law Society dispatches, musings in the legal press and NHL off-season developments?

Worry not, good citizens.  SlawTips to the rescue!

Numerous solutions are now being rolled out by developers all over the planet, in a last-minute race to July that is reminiscent in urgency, at least, of a mad scramble to meet an unbendable court filing deadline by 4:30 pm on the Friday afternoon before a summer long weekend.

Some of the best of those solutions are still works-in-progress as at this writing, and time will tell which will emerge as the leader.

Digg Reader

We will be keeping a very close eye on Digg Reader, soft launched in beta yesterday, but not yet available to the general public.  Like all the fledgling replacements, it promises to speedily migrate feeds and folders from Google Reader, will offer a clean interface and will have the ability to easily share items on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms.

FeeddlerRSS

The writer`s current mobile solution-of-choice is Feeddler.

Feeddler RSS is a reader app for iPhones and iPads that was originally built in reliance on the Google Reader back-end for its feed data.   Earlier this week, it released an update that allows the use of alternate RSS readers at the back-end to feed your feeds to Feeddler.

Those alternate readers, currently supported by Feeddler, are:

• The Old Reader, a free, very clean emulation of earlier Google Reader incarnations;
• FeedHQ, with a $12.00 (US) annual subscription fee; and
• BazQux Reader – available in free, trial form at this point, and annual fee not stated.

All of these alternate readers will automatically import your Google Reader data, work well on your desktops, and keep your Apple mobile functionality seamlessly running without a hitch.

The writer, being old-school (as the kids like to say), has of course opted for The Old Reader as back-end, and can report that the Feeddler update and migration to this platform  has been largely successful, with only occasional hiccups.The desktop iteration of The Old Reader has very limited social media share functions, however, and this platform is probably best utilized as an adjunct to Feeddler, for mobile use alone.   A big drawback is that it doesn’t appear to synch across your various machines, so items you read on one computer may appear unread when logged in from another.

Since I am already using Feeddler, this migration was my path of least resistance, preserving my tried and true routine.  But it may prove to be a  mere stop-gap on the road to a better option in the weeks ahead.

Feedly

One such better option may well be Feedly.

Feedly is a sleek, cloud-based Google Reader alternative, available in desktop and mobile versions.  It performs a speedy import of your Google Reader data with easy-to-follow prompts through the changeover process.  It offers multiple view options, including list and magazine layouts, and allows efficient, direct click-through from titles to web versions of desired articles, effectively skipping a step and speeding up your reading experience.

This service could be one of the keepers.

Other Alternatives

Other high-profile alternatives include Newsibe, NewsBlur and AOL Reader.  I haven`t tested them yet, so you are on your own with these ones.

Back-Up Your Google Reader Data

If you will be migrating, its a good idea to back up your Google Reader data ASAP, so that you can take your feeds and folders with you after Reader shuts down.  Visit Google Takeout, where you can export your Reader and other Google data for posterity (and for risk-managing, document retention purposes, while you are at it).

This End is No End at All

So breathe a sigh of relief.  RSS life will go on, after all.

What are your plans for the end of Google Reader?  Let us know in the comments about the reader services you are going to test-drive.

- Garry J. Wise, Toronto

 

As of this evening, the Supreme Court of Canada Library website and catalogue will have a new look and new URLs.

This modification is due to the launch of the new court website to be in compliance with the Treasury Board Secretariat Web Standard on Usability.

http://www.scc-csc.gc.ca/lib-bib/catalogue-fra.aspx

The Law Society of Upper Canada Great Library lays the availability of online statutes and regulations in Ontario. Ontario Elaws has Current Consolidated Law as well as Source Law (Statutes and Regulations as Enacted) back to 2000. The Annual Statutes of Ontario are digitized on the Internet Archive 1981 -1999. (For Annual Statutes, the online gap appears to start in 1980 and goes back to Confederation.) The Revised Statutes of Ontario are on the Internet Archive 1914-1990 (Complete RSO’s for 1877, 1887, and 1897 are still needed online)

The Internet Archive has the annual volumes of the Ontario Regulations 1944-2008 and the Revised Regulations of Ontario 1950-1990. For earlier regulations you can consult the online index “Table of proclamations, orders-in-council and regulations made from 1st January 1933 to 20th May 1944” through the Ontario Legislative Library catalogue. The Ontario Gazette is online from 2000-current.

Current Ontario Hansard is on the Legislative Assembly of Ontario website (1981-present), and historical Ontario Hansard (1945- 1980) is available on the Internet Archive, so no gaps here, other than the first year of Hansard, 1944.

Bills are on the Legislative Assembly of Ontario website from 1995 to current. Digitized versions of all versions of public and private bills from 1867–1998 are also available on the Internet Archive. While current Journals are available on the Legislative Assembly of Ontario website (see Votes and Proceedings), the full text of historical Journals of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from December 1867 to September 2005 are available through the Legislative Library catalogue , on the Internet Archive and through Our Ontario

Also check out Bora Laskin Law Library’s guide Older Canadian Legislation

Any way you slice it, there is a lot of junk on YouTube. And 72 hours of new junk is uploaded every minute of every day. It would take you 6,400 years to watch all the videos on YouTube. Doubt you have time for that.
Devour.com comes to your rescue. This site sifts and sorts the junk to find best videos and a well-curated collection is posted every weekday. Fewer cute kittens, fewer nutshots, fewer laughing babies, and best of all – no crazy comments. Awesome! Visit Devour.com to watch some great videos.

Courthouse Libraries BC's 2012 Annual Report is now available. In 2012,  staff in our seven resource and regional branches handled over 45,000 information requests from lawyers and members of the public.

There are a number of articles about how libraries can be part of law firm-wide Knowledge Management projects and initiatives. Ted Tjaden has written a particularly good article on the subject: “The Evolution of Law-Related Knowledge Management in North America – Opportunities for Law Librarians”. However there is very little literature out there on how law libraries can use knowledge management processes within the library.

Private law libraries tend to be small, so they may not feel the need to have a formal KM program. That said, most law libraries are already practicing some sort of informal KM, even if it is as simple as asking the other members of staff “so what were you working on today?”

The aim of KM in a law firm library should mirror the aims of the law firm: to maximize the quality and efficiency of the service provided to the firm’s clients. One important goal of KM is to reduce the amount of time spent repeating work or locating information that should be easily available. Fortunately for librarians, they are naturally predisposed towards organizing information so it is easily found.

Figuring out what information needs to be shared among the library staff members is probably the biggest challenge. Useful information is often either the information that staff members assume that everyone already knows, or the information that they cannot imagine anyone needing to know.

Law libraries do not need to use specialised software to manage their KM needs; existing software can be used for library knowledge management initiatives. Possible tools include wikis, Sharepoint, and existing library software. If the law firm has a document management system, the library should take full advantage of it, rather than having important documents stored on a single person’s computer. Keeping documents on the DMS means that they are automatically backed up and can easily be shared with other people.

Knowledge management initiatives that can be of use in a law firm library include:

• Policy and procedure manuals. Manuals help with training new staff and getting staff back up to speed after leaves. (From personal experience, the procedure manual I wrote for my maternity leave replacement was incredibly helpful to me when I returned from a year’s leave.) These manuals should be revised on a regular basis with new hires being encouraged to add information and make suggestions. Codifying these procedures can be a useful exercise in itself, as it forces you to consider whether the current system is the best way of doing something.

• Frequently asked questions.

• Lists of contact people (along with helpful notations such as “person X is an expert in the area of Y”). These may be vendors, subject experts, or helpful contacts in government and other organizations.

• Lists of passwords. Even if the password is for a database or service that is used by only one person, it is good to have it in a central location. This is helpful not only if the password holder leaves the firm or is incapacitated, but also as an easy way for a library staff member to determine if the organization has access to a particular resource.

•  Database of reference questions. These allow for continuity with reference questions. In my library we have had reference questions that took months to answer; if staff members were away during that time, making sure information on a in-progress question was shared allowed other members of the library to work on the question for seamless service.

• Bibliographies. These can include a bibliography created as an answer to a reference question or one created by a library staff member as a pathfinder to help with research.

All of these tools should be kept in a central location where they can be easily accessed and updated by library staff.

External users can also benefit from library-based knowledge management initiatives. For example, the library can take the information it has stored on answered reference questions and turn it into a client-side database. The Courthouse Libraries BC has done this with their excellent Asked and Answered which the they “originally developed as a private tool for Courthouse Library staff.”

Robert, I am looking forward to your next post. The suppression of many or most the grand old legal publishing brands of our youth seems to be an inevitability.

Regarding the future of the CCH brand, reference to it on its Canadian web site and in the Canadian monthly newsletter continues, but in a much smaller type size than Wolters Kluwer, which has been placed directly above the reference to CCH. It looks to me as if it could be step 1 in the execution of a plan to replace CCH with Wolters Kluwer, but no one from Wolters Kluwer has shared any information with me on the subject. It just looks like something we have seen before when companies seek to change their brand.

The next brand potentially at risk in Canada is that of the Canada Law Book Company which was acquired by Carswell not that long ago. Unlike the treatment of the Carswell name, there has been no attempt to add the phrase "A Thomson Reuters Business" after the name Canada Law Book. Unless the Cartwright family negotiated a requirement at the time that the business was sold that their brand be continued on their products, it seems inevitable that it will disappear over time. On the other hand, Les Editions Yvon Blais, the Quebec business unit of Carswell, continues much as before, with no reference to either Carswell or Thomson Reuters in the title. This is likely to ensure that no attention is being drawn to the ongoing receipt by Thomson Reuters of large annual federal government publishing grants from the Department of Canadian Heritage on account of the Yvon Blais publishing program.

The Butterworths brand name was banished from Canadian print titles published by LexisNexis Canada at the direction of the former global leader of LexisNexis when reviewing the mock-ups that had been prepared for Halsburys Laws of Canada. This proved to be the smart thing to do in Quebec where the Butterworths brand would have been perceived in a negative light if it had been added to the covers of the Juris Classeur encyclopedias.

Amy Taylor, JD, MLIS, of American University, has posted the video and slides of her presentation, Developing an Ontology of Legal Research, given last week at CALICon 2013: Conference for Law School Computing.

Here is the abstract:

This session will describe my efforts to develop a legal ontology for teaching legal research. There are currently more than twenty legal ontologies worldwide that encompass legal knowledge, legal problem solving, legal drafting and information retrieval, and subjects such as IP, but no ontology of legal research. A legal research ontology could be useful because the transition from print to digital sources has shifted the way research is conducted and taught. Legal print sources have much of the structure of legal knowledge built into them (see the attached slide comparing screen shots from Westlaw and WestlawNext), so teaching students how to research in print also helps them learn the subject they are researching. With the shift to digital sources, this structure is now only implicit, and researchers must rely more upon a solid foundation in the structure of legal knowledge. The session will also describe my choice of OWL as the language that best meets the needs in building this ontology. The session will also explore the possibilities of representing this legal ontology in a more compact visual form to make it easier to incorporate into legal research instruction.

Filed under: Applications, Presentations, Slides, Technology developments, Technology tools, Videos Tagged: Amy Taylor, CALICon, CALICon 2013, Conference for Law School Computing, Legal knowledge representation, Legal ontologies, Legal research ontologies, Legal research ontology, Legal semantic web, Ontologies of legal research, Ontology of legal research, Semantic Web and law

I totally overlooked this little news item.

It came up last week at a meeting here at work and I just forgot to post about it: intervenor factums in Supreme Court of Canada appeals have been made available for free on the court's website since April 2013.

Appellants’ and respondents’ factums have been available electronically since February 2009.

In March, Mike Lissner wrote for this blog about the troubling state of access to case law – noting with dismay that most of the US corpus is not publicly available. While a few states make official cases available, most still do not, and neither does the federal government. At Ravel Law we’re building a new legal research platform and, like Mike, we’ve spent substantial time troubleshooting access to law issues. Here, we will provide some more detail about how official case law is created and share our recommendations for making it more available and usable. We focus in particular on FDsys – the federal judiciary’s effort in this space – but the ideas apply broadly.

The Problem

If you ask a typical federal court clerk, such as our friend Rose, about the provenance of case opinions you will only learn half the story. Rose can tell you that after she and her judge finish an opinion it gets sent to a permanent court staffer. After that the story that Rose knows basically ends. The opinion at this stage is in its “slip” opinion state, and only some time later will Rose see the “official” version – which will have a citation number, copy edits, and perhaps other alterations. Yet, it is only this new “official” version that may be cited in court. For Mike Lissner, for Ravel, and for many others, the crux of the access challenge lies in steps beyond Rose’s domain, beyond the individual court’s in fact – when a slip becomes an official opinion.

For years the federal government has outsourced the creation of official opinions, relying on Westlaw and Lexis to create and publish them. These publishers are handed slip opinions by court staff, provide some editing, assign citations and release official versions through their systems. As a result, access to case law has been de facto privatized, and restricted.

FDsys

Of late, however, courts are making some strides to change the nature of this system. The federal judiciary’s primary effort in this regard is FDsys (and also see the 9^th Circuit’s recent moves). But FDsys’s present course gives reason to worry that its goals have been too narrowly conceived to achieve serious benefit. This discourages the program’s natural supporters and endangers its chances of success.

We certainly count ourselves amongst FDsys’s strongest supporters, and we applaud the Judicial Conference for its quick work so far. And, as friends of the program, we want to offer feedback about how it might address the substantial skepticism it faces from those in the legal community who want the program to succeed but fear for its ultimate success and usability.

Our understanding is that FDsys’s primary goal is to provide free public access to court opinions. Its strategy for doing so (as inexpensively and as seamlessly as possible) seems to be to fully implement the platform at all federal courts before adding more functionality. This last point is especially critical. Because FDsys only offers slip opinions, which can’t be cited in court, its current usefulness for legal professionals is quite limited; even if every court used FDsys it would only be of marginal value. As a result, the legal community lacks incentive to lend its full, powerful, support to the effort. This support would be valuable in getting courts to adopt the system and in providing technology that could further reduce costs and help to overcome implementation hurdles.

Setting Achievable Goals

We believe that there are several key goals FDsys can accomplish, and that by doing so it will win meaningful support from the legal community and increase its end value and usage. With loftier goals (some modest, others ambitious), FDsys would truly become a world-class opinion publishing system. The following are the goals we suggest, along with metrics that could be used to assess them.

Goal	Metrics
1. Comprehensive Access to Opinions	- Does every federal court release every published and unpublished opinion?
	- Are the electronic records comprehensive in their historic reach?
2. Opinions that can be Cited in Court	- Are the official versions of cases provided, not just the slip opinions?
	- And/or, can the version released by FDsys be cited in court?
3. Vendor-Neutral Citations	- Are the opinions provided with a vendor-neutral citation (using, e.g., paragraph numbers)?
4. Opinions in File Formats that Enable Innovation	- Are opinions provided in both human and machine-readable formats?
5. Opinions Marked with Meta-Data	- Is a machine-readable language such as XML used to tag information like case date, title, citation, etc?
	- Is additional markup of information such as sectional breaks, concurrences, etc. provided?
6. Bulk Access to Opinions	- Are cases accessible via bulk access methods such as FTP or an API?

 

The first three goals are the basic building blocks necessary to achieve meaningful open-access to the law. As Professor Martin of Cornell Law and others have chronicled, the open-access community has converged around these goals in recent years, and several states (such as Oklahoma) have successfully implemented them with very positive results.

Goals 3-6 involve the electronic format and storage medium used, and are steps that would be low-cost enablers of massive innovation. If one intention of the FDsys project is to support the development of new legal technologies, the data should be made accessible in ways that allow efficient computer processing. Word documents and PDFs do not accomplish this. PDFs, for example, are a fine format for archival storage and human reading, but computers don’t easily read them and converting PDFs into more usable forms is expensive and imperfect.

In contrast, publishing cases at the outset in a machine-readable format is easy and comes at virtually no additional cost. It can be done in addition to publishing in PDF. Courts and the GPO already have electronic versions of cases and with a few mouse clicks could store them in a format that would inspire innovation rather than hamper it. The legal technology community stands ready to assist with advice and development work on all of these issues.

We believe that FDsys is a commendable step toward comprehensive public access to law, and toward enabling innovation in the legal space. Left to its current trajectory, however, it is certain to fall short of its potential. With some changes now, the program could be a home run for the entire legal community, ensuring that clerks like Rose can rest assured that the law as interpreted by her judge is accessible to everyone.

 

Daniel Lewis and Nik Reed are graduates of Stanford Law School and the co-founders of Ravel Law, a legal search, analytics, and collaboration platform. In 2012, Ravel spun out of a Stanford University Law School, Computer Science Department, and Design School collaborative research effort focused on legal citation networks and information design. The Ravel team includes software engineers and data scientists from Stanford, MIT, and Georgia Tech. You can follow them on Twitter @ravellaw

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed.

PDF documents are great when you want to make it easy for anyone to view or print a document. But what happens when you need to alter a PDF? You can, of course, do it with Adobe Acrobat or other expensive PDF Editors, but you can also do it for free with Google Docs! It’s easy.
First, take the PDF you want to alter and upload it to Google Docs. Next, check the Convert text from PDF and image files to Google Documents checkbox. This converts a PDF document into a rich text document you can edit. When you are done your edits, you can download the document as text or flip it back into a PDF file.
Bet most of you didn’t know you can alter PDFs with Google Docs.

Welcome news from David Whelan of the Great Library – Law Society of Upper Canada:

You can now print and download articles older than 18 months free of charge from the Law Society’s CLE collection, powered by the Great Library.

The service - AccessCLE - has been 100% pay-per-view since its inception in 2007 and contains over 6,000 PDF articles going back to 2004.  The articles represent the individual presentations from CLE/CPD seminars put on by the Law Society.  Our partnership with the Law Society’s CPD team is ongoing and we continue to receive and add metadata to articles from recent presentations.

The 18 month window is a rolling period.  Content within that window is still available but is pay-per-view.  You can search for both free and paid articles with either AccessCLE itself or through our discovery engine, Infolocate.ca.

If you need more information please contact Olcay Atacan at oatacan@lsuc.on.ca.  We hope this change will improve your ability to access and use this information.

CLE materials are a fantastic place to start a legal research question.  They often offer practical advice from expert practitioners. Congratulations to the staff at the Great Library who power this project!

I used to have a working VHS player and a copy of the movie Speed. Often a scene from the movie will pop into my (overactive?) mind when I am looking for legislation from my desk:

01:03:38 – Jack, what did he say?
01:03:42 – What's the matter?
01:03:49 – There's a gap in the freeway. – What?
01:03:53 – What do you mean? – How big is a gap?
01:03:56 – 50 feet. A couple of miles ahead.

I remember when looking for legislation at my desk was rarely a reasonable option. Today, if I can't browse my way to what I am looking for I feel (quite unreasonably) annoyed.

I should be feeling very lucky. In Alberta, we have the Alberta Law collection at Our Future Our Past: a searchable repository of bills, statutes, pre-Alberta ordinances, the Alberta Hansard and Alberta journals and the Alberta gazette. This collection is part of the Alberta Heritage Digitization Project, a non-profit endeavour that ran from 1999 to 2010. The site covers the early stuff really, really well.

I am also lucky that the Alberta Queen's Printer offers plenty of great material, including the Alberta Gazette from 1995 onward. The QP also has a very reasonably priced subscription site QP Source Professional with annual statute volumes from 1996 on, Orders in Council back to 1967, though many years are a list only and do not include the appendices where regulations are found.

In Alberta, our gap is 1991 to 1995 for annual statute volumes and 1991-1994 for regulations. No quite 50 feet of road, but unlike Sandra Bullock, I don't have access to a gas pedal to clear the gap.

Do you know where your gap is for electronic legislation in your jurisdiction?

The web is littered with movie quotes. This one came from Subzin.

A brand new peer-reviewed academic journal has just come into being and is issuing a call for papers. The Journal of Open Access to Law (JOAL) is a project of Cornell's Legal Information Institute (LII), the Italian National Research Council's Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (ITTIG-CNR), and the Institute of Law and Technology (IDT) of the Autonomous University in Barcelona.

From the main web page:

JOAL is an open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal of international scope. Its purpose is to promote international research on the topic of open access to law.

JOAL provides an international forum for academic researchers as well as for practitioners of open legal publishing. Central topics of concern include

• critical construction of legal information methods
• governance of new models of legal publishing
• the relationship between open-access legal information and technology
• projects in open access to law
• the technical challenges and economic opportunities created by open access to law and public sector information
• the economic dimensions of open access to law
• trends and changes suggested by the globalization of access

JOAL is meant to stimulate and promote an interdisciplinary approach to law, relocating classical topics in a new framework at the crossroads of law and history, law and literature, law and philosophy, law and technology, and law and AI.

As you'd imagine, given the project founders, there's a pretty impressive international team of editors, including among them Colin Lachance, President of CanLII (and a Slaw columnist).

Pro Bono Quebec has launched Votre Boussole Juridique ("Your Legal Compass"), an online search tool to help Quebecers find free or low cost legal information.

For the launch, Pro Bon Quebec has compiled some 300 legal resources including public legal information sites and services, lawyer referral services, and legal aid services.

Users can search for resources by geographical regiojn or by topic (e.g. youth, consumer protection, family, etc.).

Pro Bono Quebec is a network of Quebec lawyers who provide free volunteer legal services to the population.

This interesting piece by Canadian and Estonian scholars is here.

The abstract reads:

Previous work indicates that over the past 20 years, the highest quality work have been published in an increasingly diverse and larger group of journals. In this paper we examine whether this diversification has also affected the handful of elite journals that are traditionally considered to be the best. We examine citation patterns over the past 40 years of 7 long-standing traditionally elite journals and 6 journals that have been increasing in importance over the past 20 years. To be among the top 5% or 1% cited papers, papers now need about twice as many citations as they did 40 years ago. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s elite journals have been publishing a decreasing proportion of these top cited papers. This also applies to the two journals that are typically considered as the top venues and often used as bibliometric indicators of “excellence”, Science and Nature. On the other hand, several new and established journals are publishing an increasing proportion of most cited papers. These changes bring new challenges and opportunities for all parties. Journals can enact policies to increase or maintain their relative position in the journal hierarchy. Researchers now have the option to publish in more diverse venues knowing that their work can still reach the same audiences. Finally, evaluators and administrators need to know that although there will always be a certain prestige associated with publishing in “elite” journals, journal hierarchies are in constant flux so inclusion of journals into this group is not permanent.

Hat tip to DocuTicker.com.

Cross-posted at Law Library Blog.

Ravel, a search visualization, analytics, and annotation platform of United States Supreme Court and Circuit Court cases, now offers free and unlimited access directly through the website (in beta mode). The database, according to its founders, is generally as comprehensive and up-to-date as Google Scholar (meaning complete Supreme Court collection & Circuit Court coverage back to ~1950). They expect to add California, New York, and Delaware case law during the summer.

According to a story from the Daily Journal (“Entrepreneurs use design to launch legal startup,” December 31, 2012) founders Dan Lewis and Nik Reed

. . . set out to create a website that would visually map out case histories so legal professionals could more easily extract important information, such as how many times a case had been cited and what cases incorporated similar key words and phrases.

Co-founders Dan Lewis and Nik Reed are Stanford Law School alumni and their company is discussed in a recent article from the Stanford Lawyer, “The Cutting Edge:   
A Positive Disruption: The Transformation of Law Through Technology.”

 

 

 

 

Web Clipping is one of our favorite Evernote features. With a simple click of our browser extension, you can save just about anything you see online into your Evernote account for permanent safekeeping. Today, we’re taking this one step further. The Evernote Web Clipper for Chrome now lets you clip from Gmail!

Install the Evernote Web Clipper for Chrome

Gmail Clipping

Email accounts are much more than a history of conversations. They contain photos, research, files, purchase receipts, travel itineraries, and just about everything in between. The trouble with email is that with thousands of emails in an account, it become incredibly difficult to organize things and find what you need, which is precisely where Evernote excels.

Whenever you receive an important email, simply open it and click on the Web Clipper. The email, along with any attached files, will be saved to Evernote. The Web Clipper grabs only what it can see, so if you want to clip all parts of the conversation, be sure to expand the thread.

You’ll also be able to place it into your notebook of choice, assign any relevant tags and add a note.

Easy to Find

Once in Evernote, the full email conversation appears as a nicely formatted note, that’s tagged and organized however you like. The subject line becomes the note’s title and all the email addresses of recipients show up near the top. If you’re a Premium user, then we’ll also make any attached documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs searchable. Upgrade to Evernote Premium

Great for Work

Like many companies, we use Gmail here at Evernote. Using the Chrome Web Clipper helps us spend less time sifting through our email for a specific attachment or image, and more time working efficiently. If you use Evernote at the office too, take a look at Evernote Business.

The April 2013 edition of BarTalk included our inaugural Courthouse Libraries tips feature, where we told you about three unexpected ways to use CanLII. To fill these out a little more, we offer here an expanded version of our CanLII tips.

Before we begin, I need to make a confession: I love CanLII. I love the simplicity of use and the innovation that drives it to get better all the time. Even more, I love what it represents - the legal profession in Canada is dedicated to ensuring that every Canadian from St. John's to Prince Rupert has access to their laws. It makes me proud to think that part of my Law Society fees go towards building this tool. But as if this initial bias weren't enough, CanLII continually gives me new reasons to appreciate it all the time. In this article, we will share with you three of the lesser known tools of CanLII that make up some the reasons I’m smitten.

Most of us are familiar with the features of CanLII that allow users to find cases and look up statutes. Some of you may be using it note up cases or "find cases citing this decision". But I am guessing that there may be some things you didn't know it could do.   

Use CanLII for Commentary

Did you know that you can use CanLII to find secondary sources? 
Simply select the “Commentary” option on the left sidebar to get access. 

 

 

In 2012, CanLII published its first legal text complete with all of the things you would expect in a legal volume: well-respected authors and updates that happen four times a year. The etext on Wrongful Dismissal and Employment Law allows you to start your research with CanLII in a way that then links seamlessly to the case law. For example, you can start in Chapter 17 on "Injunctive Relief: Enforcing Covenants Not to Compete/Solicit" and review the overriding principles. You can then move on to see the case summaries at the end of the chapter to get a lay of the landscape. Finally,  if you decide you'd like to read further into the reasoning of Hub International (Richmond Auto Mall) Ltd. v. Mendham, 2011 BCSC 1780, you can link directly to this case and then do a note up to see how it's been considered since. This is efficiency I know we can all appreciate.

The Wrongful Dismissal and Employment Law text was the first one to be included but CanLII has since added two separate texts on the Charter that are sure to be of interest to a number of practitioners. This is certainly an area to watch. 

Compare Legislation

If any of you have heard me talk about CanLII's legislation comparison feature, you will know that this feature fills me with a kind of giddy excitement that is reserved for only the most afflicted law geeks. That said, I think one look and you'll agree that the presentation of this feature is nothing short of beautiful.

So how do you use it? Open a copy of your favourite piece of oft-changing legislation in CanLII, paying special attention to the "Compare" button at the top:

 
(Yes, it was under your nose this whole time.)

Select the timeframes that you would like to look at and then press Compare. CanLII will now display a screen that lines up the two sections of the Act side-by-side, much like you would do if you had the books in front of you. But even better, it highlights the sections of the Act that have changed between your two time frames.

And better yet, this unassuming little 3/39 at the top?

 

That tells you that you are looking at the 3rd of 39 changes that happened between those two revisions. Clicking on the arrow will take you directly to the changes. As a final perk, CanLII also reminds you at the top of each Act the applicable date ranges that apply to each revision. 

 

The limitation of this feature is that you cannot go back in time all that far, so if you are dealing with older legislation you will still need to do it the old fashioned way. Also, legislation that has been amended very frequently, like the Motor Vehicle Act, seems to have entirely too many changes for CanLII to handle. That said, when it works it is a significant time saver and a little fun in the process (that may be the aforementioned law geek rearing her head).

Make CanLII Do the Work for You

One of the most powerful features of CanLII may be the fact that you can set it up to do your work for you. You can know when a law changes, when your key case is overturned and if there are any new cases on the topic of "parental alienation" in British Columbia as soon as they are available. It does all of this without your needing to visit the CanLII website.

Instead, you can have these alerts delivered to you via the power of RSS.

 
My colleague Nate Russell wrote an excellent piece detailing these kind of searches in Life Hacks for Lawyers: Search-based RSS, which I will recommend rather than repeat.   

It should be noted that one of the most popular ways to access RSS, Google Reader, has announced that it will be shutting down on July 1, 2013. That said, there are many excellent alternatives and a number of companies that are working to convert any existing Google Reader accounts seamlessly. Most of these are available for free. I am planning a piece to go into more detail on these but in the meantime, check out articles like this one.

So there you have it, three unexpected ways to use CanLII. I hope you discovered something new and perhaps even feel the beginnings of your own love affair with this tool. 

If you have any questions about this or other research methods, I would invite you to contact our excellent team at librarian@courthouselibrary.ca. 

 

One of the things we get asked on a regular basis about a piece of legislation, a regulation or a court rule is, "When did this change?" and "what did it look like before/after it changed?"

To find the legislative history of an act, we regularly turn to the Table of Legislative Changes. These handy tables allow you to easily look up the section you are interested in and see when it was last amended.

However, regulations, and court rules in particular, are trickier. The Index of Current BC Regulations (available in the Vancouver and Victoria courthouse libraries) lists all of the regulations under each act, as well as all of the amending regulations. This tells you if the rules were amended by a particular regulation, but not which rule was actually amended. This means, for example, if you were interested in rule 20-1, you would have to read each regulation in its entirety to see if it's affecting that rule.

To help us speed things up, we created the Amendment Trackers for the Court Rules.

They are intended to track any changes made to the current Rules since they came into force. They list:

• the affected rule;
• the type of change (amended, repealed, repealed & replaced, or new);
• the regulation bringing the change (including section number), and;
• the date the change comes into force.

We have Amendment Trackers for the following rules of court:

• BC Court of Appeal Civil Rules 
• BC Court of Appeal Criminal Rules 
• BC Supreme Court Civil Rules 
• BC Supreme Court Family Rules 
• BC Supreme Court Criminal Rules 
• BC Provincial Court Adult Guardianship Rules
• BC Provincial Court Child, Family and Community Service Act Rules 
• BC Provincial Court Criminal Caseflow Management Rules 
• BC Provincial Court Family Rules 

You can also find the Court Rules Amendment Trackers under Guides on our Training & Tutorials page.

At this year’s annual Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference, held in Montreal, I was most excited about getting to know the community, subsisting on croissants for a week, and attending Carole Mehu’s session, “Lost in Translation? Quebec Sources for Non-Quebec Librarians.” Carole is the Regional Library Services Director at Norton Rose and she imparted her wealth of knowledge of free sources for Quebec legislation and case law, along with invaluable contextual information. 

Case Law

The Quebec courts render decisions only in the language they were heard in. This means if a decision was heard in English, the court only produces the decision in English, and vice versa, unless one of the parties orders a translation, as per section 9 of the Charter of the French Language. Even when a decision is rendered in English, sometimes attorneys interchangeably use English and French, which can create some difficulties with searching for or reading a case. The Honourable Mr. Justice Allan Hilton provides an example of this within his paper The Practice of Law in Quebec: An Anglophone’s Perspective:

"My Lord, we have been referred to you by the Greffière spéciale because we cannot agree on an échéancier for this case and we want you to fix one. In addition, I wish to present an application for an ordonnance de sauvegarde to remain in effect until the hearing on the injonction interlocutoire." 

Translated into proper English, this statement would be as follows: 

"My Lord, the Special Clerk has referred us to you because we cannot agree on a timetable for this case and we want you to establish one. In addition, I wish to present an application for a safeguard order to remain in force until the hearing on the interlocutory injunction."

SOQUIJ produces around two hundred unofficial English translations per year, mostly within criminal and family subjects.  Here’s where it becomes a little tricky; the English Translations page allows you to search for cases that were originally in French and have unofficial English translations. But this page does not have decisions that were originally in English. Those are kept within a separate page.

You can search for English translations by court level and by year on the English Translations page.

To find decisions originally rendered in English, search Quicklaw, LawSource, CanLII or the Trouver une Décision page on SOQJUI. When looking for decisions on SOQJUI, sometimes the first text is in French and you have to scroll down to see the translation.