Starting this week, members who come to the Great Library are able to use WestlawNext Canada from any of the desktop computers. We have purchased a subscription to LawSource, CriminalSource, Estates and TrustsSource and FamilySource, as well as parts of Litigator.
If this is a new-to-you product, we are able to get you set up to take advantage of all the resources available in Westlaw. We will also bring in dedicated trainers from time to time for more intensive training.
By providing both on-site and off-site electronic resources, we can provide the most efficient and effective legal research opportunities for all members. Be sure to take advantage of them either through your own efforts, or by asking us for help.
No, I am not talking about HeinOnline. The Law Society of Ontario’s AccessCLE site hosts, at the time of writing, 9,543 CPD articles dating from 2004 to 2019.
Here is an overview of the browsable collection.
With this many articles available at a single source, best bet might be to use search rather than browse – and my preference would be to bypass the single-line command search and go straight to the Advanced Search.
Advanced Search allows you to select searching fields (Title, Author, Full-text, etc) using drop-down menus, and to search multiple fields at once. If I am looking for articles on resulting trusts, I might use the drop-downs to select Article Title, then place my terms in separate boxes. So I am searching for articles that include both words – “resulting” and “trusts” – in the title.
The far right searching column (not appearing in the screen capture here) allows you to select the AND or the OR operator. In this case, I am searching for terms that are complementary, so I use AND. If I were searching for terms that were synonyms or antonyms (e.g. “resulting trusts” and “constructive trusts”) – then I might use OR.
My search has retrieved four hits. Don’t be dissuaded by the low “Relevance” ratings. Clearly these are four articles that feature Resulting Trusts as a principal topic. The latest article is from 2017 and the oldest one is from 2007. And, of course, the PDF buttons in the View column on the far right enable you to view the full-text article.
Not all documents in this database are actually “articles.” Some are PowerPoint presentations or checklists. But after briefly perusing the results of this search and a few others – it looks to me like AccessCLE contains a great wealth of predominantly full-text, substantial legal articles.
[Guest author Sarah Sutherland. Cross-posted from The CanLII Blog.]
Over 9,500 decisions from the Manitoba Reports have been added to CanLII!
CanLII is grateful to have received a grant from the Manitoba Law Foundation to add decisions from the first and second series of the Manitoba Reports to CanLII.org.
For the last year we have been doing research into what gaps there are in legal research for jurisdictions across Canada. In Manitoba we discovered that there was a gap in access to historical caselaw for the province. Following this we applied for a grant to help fill that gap.
We have added around 4,500 decisions from the first series and 5,000 from the second series of the Manitoba Reports. You can find them on CanLII using this search query.
Thank you to Karen Dyck, Erin Wilcott, and the staff at the Manitoba Law Foundation for making this grant possible, and Karen Sawatzky at the Manitoba Law Library for helping us identify local needs.
Legal literature studies show that lawyers usually read texts in chunks, finding the specific section that is relevant to the issue they are researching, and ignoring the rest. The finding aids (Table of Contents and Index) are invaluable in determining which part of the text is important.
There’s another way to discover relevant information, by applying critical thinking to the content. For instance, a frequent visitor to the library told me that in reviewing one of our e-books, Prosecuting and Defending Drug Cases: A Practitioner’s Handbook, he realized Ch. 2, Bail Hearings in Drug Cases was applicable to almost all bail hearings. This is good information for me to be able to pass on to others, especially when I don’t have another text solely on bail to rely on.
In my own law firm experience, I would often receive requests for information on easements. The leading text on real property law, Anger and Honsberger: Law of Real Property has a section on easements in Ch. 17. We had an electronic library catalogue which included the table of contents, but wasn’t detailed enough to capture this section, so I added a note indicating this text had a significant chapter on easements. That way, if you did a search of the catalogue with the keyword “easements”, it would come to the top.
Book reviews are another source of information, particularly in subjects I’m not familiar with. Reviewers typically describe not only the content but the format of the book from a personal perspective that can resonate with me. For instance, in this review of The Fundamentals of Statutory Interpretation Erica Anderson, Manager, Digital and Web Content at the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, comments that she recently attended a hearing at the Supreme Court of Canada and:
was amazed to hear the judges and lawyers separately mention or quote the modern principle of statutory interpretation in their arguments, questions, and comments. In particular, an SCC judge commented that they had looked at the second reading of Hansard and committee debates for indication of legislative intent.
2019 CLLR 44-3, p. 27
The hardest part for me is retaining these little nuggets for the next time someone asks for a resource on that particular subject.
The Manitoba Law Library would like to acknowledge with gratitude that we are situated on Treaty One Territory, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree and Dakota peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation.
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