CanLII – Know How, the blog of the Great Library

The Future (of Legal Citation in Canada) is Now

If you’re a member of, or work anywhere adjacent to, the Canadian legal information community, you’ll have heard by now that there is a new citation guide on the scene: the Canadian Open Access Legal (COAL) Citation Guide. Published in early June 2024, the COAL Citation Guide represents 2 years’ worth of energy and effort by a collective of law librarians and legal professionals across the country, and encompasses input from students, educators, and practitioners throughout the field of Canadian law. Read on if you, like me, might benefit from more context about how and why to use the COAL Guide in your legal research and writing.

Remote Access to Online CPD Materials

Did you know that you can remotely access continuing professional development (CPD) materials through the Great Library’s catalogue? Whether searching through the “Everything”¹or “CPD”²tab (shown below), you can search, summon, download and send digitized CPD materials remotely.

Searches using the “Everything” tab are conducted on the search platform InfoLocate. While searches on this platform will summon results other than CPD materials, you can use the filter “Online Law Society CLE Articles” found on the left to narrow your results to only include online CPD materials. See below:

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Searches using the “CPD” tab are conducted using the database AccessCLE. This database is home to hundreds of free, digitized PDFs of Law Society of Ontario CPD materials.

Another place to look for online CPD materials is CanLII. The County of Carleton Law Association CPD materials from 2018 and 2019 were recently made available on CanLII’s “Commentary” platform. Find these by navigating to the “Conference Proceedings” link on the Commentary page, or click here.

Having access to CPD materials can really come in handy as they are a great way to keep up to date on emerging legal issues and can act as primers or introductory overviews of major legal topics in a given field. They are also great tools for finding forms and precedents!

Je ne parle pas français: Tips for finding English versions of French language case law

Few things are more frustrating than finding your “golden case”—the case that will answer all your questions, solve all your problems and surely render opposing counsel speechless—only to realize you cannot understand a word of it because it’s been reported in French (and, well, you don’t speak French). While the search for English translations of case law reported in French is not entirely hopeless, it can be a challenge.