Research Tip: Thousands of Canadian Legal Articles Free!

[Reposted with permission from Legal Sourcery, by Ken Fox]

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.

Please note: The library will be closing early on Friday, December 13th at 11:00AM for a special event.  Regular library service will resume Monday, December 16th at 8:30AM.

The Great Library will be closed from December 25, 2024 to January 1, 2025 for the winter holidays. Regular office hours will resume on Thursday, January 2, 2025.