The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales
Here’s the Weekly Case Law Update for August 27, 2018.
If you are a member of the Law Society of Manitoba, and would like a copy of any of the decisions from the digest please contact the library and we will be happy to provide those for you.
The August 2018 edition, Update No. 87, has just been released.
In This Issue
Occasionally, members request decisions and legislation from the United Kingdom. In order to fill that need, we subscribe to ICLR, The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales. Each week we receive the Weekly Case Law Update. We plan to make this a regular Monday feature for readers of Great LEXpectations.
If, after reading the digest, you would like a copy of any of the decisions, please contact us and we will be happy to provide it to members of the Law Society of Manitoba.
Here’s the Weekly Case Law Update for July 30, 2018.
If you’ve ever tried to search Hansard, the federal government’s written record of every parliamentary debate, you know that even though it’s been digital for a long time, historical records were notoriously difficult to review. That’s because when Canadiana digitized it, it was as pictures and not text. A University of Toronto team of political scientists, computer scientists and historians decided to do something about it.
In 2013, [Christopher] Cochrane teamed up with two postdoctoral researchers, two PhD students and Graeme Hirst, professor of computer science at U of T Scarborough, to create LiPaD: The Linked Parliamentary Data Project.
LiPaD has digitized and made searchable Canada’s parliamentary debates dating back to 1901. It also created and designed a website to make the documents more accessible to the public, a project headed by PhD student Tanya Whyte.
A huge thank you and congratulations to this team for making this part of Canada’s legislative record available to everyone.
Full article available here.
h/t KnowItAALL, AALL’s daily newsletter
As information professionals, we are specialists in finding answers. But we also love to share our methods with everyone. One way to do this is by creating guides and tutorials on how to do what to us, are simple tasks, but to others, may be a challenge. The first guide we’ve created is on how to know when there are new Manitoba decisions on CanLII.
Manitoba’s courts have been distributing their decisions for free on CanLII since the turn of the century. Currently, we distribute the decisions to the legal publishers the day we receive them. CanLII usually has them available online within 24 hours.
Our guide, created by Allyssa McFadyen, demonstrates how to set up an alert in your calendar program to remind you to check CanLII for new results, or how to set up an RSS feed to be notified when new content has been published. Once these systems are set up, it is a simple matter to stay on top of new caselaw.
We plan to publish additional guides in the future, on such topics as how to search Hansard (Manitoba edition), and how to use our catalogue. If you have suggestions for research methods you would like explained, please let us know. Check our page, Legal Ease, for new content. It happens to be RSS-ready.
Every Wednesday, CanLII publishes the top three English language decisions (and the top French language decision) based on viewing. Sometimes it’s the latest Supreme Court decision, other times it’s a decision reflecting a novel interpretation of the law. Or it could be what was on the curriculum at law school.
Whatever the reason, I make sure to check out the post on Slaw.ca . This is one method I use to stay abreast of new developments.
Last week’s number one decision was Mary Shuttleworth v. License Appeal Tribunal, 2018 ONSC 3790. This was an appeal of a decision denying the applicant benefits for catastrophic impairment after a motor vehicle accident.
And look – tomorrow’s Wednesday again…
Great LEXpectations RSS Feed