When should you consider reviewing decisions from foreign jurisdictions when conducting legal research? Does it depend on the issue – is it so localized that only Manitoba decisions will be persuasive? Or is it national in scope, so looking at other Canadian jurisdictions is helpful? Or, do you need to go even further, to international common law jurisdictions?
The authors of A Global Community of Courts? Modelling the Use of Persuasive Authority as a Complex Network examined the contents of the vLex database (available to you behind the Members Portal) “to quantify the flow of jurisprudence across the countries in our corpus and to explore the factors that may influence a judge’s selection of foreign jurisprudence.”
If judges are looking at it, shouldn’t you? Our subscription to vLex includes Canadian, U.S. and U.K. decisions. If you need help using it, review our guide or view the introductory webinar available after signing in to the members portal.
There is a growing discussion in the legal literature of an emerging global community of courts composed of a network of increasing judicial dialogue across national borders. We investigate the use of foreign persuasive authority in common law countries by analyzing the network of citations to case law in a corpus of over 1.5 million judgments given by the senior courts of twenty-six common law countries.
Court records or docket information aren’t always the easiest things to find. When you do find them it can be another step trying to access them. Then it gets even harder when you are dealing with other provinces and jurisdictions.
Luckily there is a great resource from the University of Windsor Paul Martin Law Library to help navigate court systems Canada wide. Click below to take a look.
The table has information from all provinces and territories, as well as the Supreme court and Federal Courts. Here, you can find information like decisions, dockets, registries, policies, and fees.
This helpful table was put together by Sarah Richmond and with help from CALL/ACBD members across Canada.
Canlli and Slaw.ca have added to their collection of eBooks with 13 new titles, with a range of different legal topics. These eBooks are collected from Slaw.ca authors and compiled to make legal research easier.
These titles are now available on desLibris. Log in to the Member’s Portal and click on Library Resources to get access.
The Law of Property provides an introduction to property law that is meant to be accessible to law students and readers with little to no legal background. It explores and explains the variety of different property rights that exist in Canadian law, the ways in which property rights can be created or transferred to others, and the resolution of disputes between people who claim competing property rights to the same thing. This book presents a thorough and enjoyable analysis of the law of property that will help readers understand both the subject as a whole and its finer details.
United Nations Law, Politics, and Practice explores the important events that shaped the United Nations under different Secretaries-General, describes the legal framework in which it operates, and discusses its politics and practice from an insider’s viewpoint. It provides sufficient information on the UN’s evolution, structure, functioning, and activities in order to empower readers to form their own thoughts about the strengths, weaknesses, successes, and failures of the UN. Students, professors, lawyers, diplomats, international public servants, and those with any interest in international relations or international law will consider this book a valuable resource examining the world’s most prominent intergovernmental organization.
The Canadian Class Action Review, Vol. 16, No. 2
Book Review: Defending Class Actions In Canada: A Guide For Defendants Michael A Crystal And Maria Khan
Flash Boys Class Actions: Civil Fraud, Conspiracy, And The Certifiability Of High-Frequency Trading Cases In Canada Lindsay Frame
An Overview Of Class Actions And Covid-19 In Ontario’s Long-Term Care Facilities Jordan Assaraf
The Unworkability Of The Workable Methodology Standard Kate Boyle And Nicholas Hooper United We Stand, Divided We Fall: Class Actions And Corporate Hegemony Rebecca Meharchand
The Limits Of Case Management: A Review And Principled Approach To The Court’s General Management Powers Paul-Erik Veel, Adil Abdulla, And Angela Hou
Determining A Fair Price For Carriage?: Applying A “Fee-Driven” Factor And Reverse Auctions To Adjudicating Carriage Motions In Ontario Timothy Law
Historical legal research is now even easier thanks to an updated legislation comparison tool from CanLII.
Users can now select two versions of an act from Federal and Provincial legislation to see what text has been changed between them. Simply click on “Versions”, choose two versions, and hit “Compare”.
Scroll through the text side by side to quickly note any differences. Text will be highlighted in red and green to show what has been removed and added.
The font and formatting of each act has also been standardized to make it easier to compare. CanLII also automatically hides any large sections of unchanged text, so scrolling and loading times are now quicker.
Try it out yourself, or learn more about this handy tool on the CanLII Blog.
Heinonline has made a couple of improvements to make searching and logging in easier.
The search box has been amalgamated into a single bar instead of split up into different categories. This will allow you to conduct a broader search in one step rather than multiple queries.
Don’t worry, the option to run a specific search is still there, it has just been integrated into the search bar with a drop down menu.
To learn more about how to use this feature, plus advanced search functions, visit this Heinonline Blog post.
For those of you that use the myHein feature, it is even easier now to log in by linking your Google account. If you are unfamiliar with myHein , it is a personal account you can use to create bookmarks, save queries, and customize your Heinonline experience. If you’re interested, see the user guide to get started.
Guest post byMelanie R. Bueckert, Legal Research Counsel – Manitoba Court of Appeal
I am very thankful for all of the excellent resources that the Great Library provides through our Law Society Member Portal. My gratitude has increased greatly during the pandemic, while I have been unable to access the law school’s library. While I often use HeinOnline to locate articles that I have already determined are relevant to my research, I hesitate to run searches of their databases, as the volume of results can be overwhelming. However, in at least two cases in the past few months, my research has been improved substantially by their “More Like This” feature. In case you haven’t used it yet, I will walk you through the very simple process.
Once you have located a relevant article in HeinOnline, look at the top of the document for the “More Like This” button. Click it. It will bring you to a list of results related to your article. If you find that they are not particularly helpful, you can tweak the “Interesting Words” weighting on the left-hand side of the screen or remove some of those words. You can also enter a new filtering term in the “Enter new term” box underneath the “Interesting Words”. You can also limit your results by date range.
According to HeinOnline:
More Like This uses a program which finds ‘interesting words’ in an article, as determined by an algorithm that analyzes the article’s text. …
More Like This compares all articles in HeinOnline and ranks them in order based on which articles’ interesting words are most similar to the first article. Results include the top 50 most relevant articles available in HeinOnline.
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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