The Centre de recherche en droit public (CRDP), the oldest research center of the University of Montreal, was established in 1962. To my knowledge the CRDP is also the oldest research center in law in Canada. Beyond its longevity, CRDP’s merits are numerous. I just want to mention here those which relate to legal information and legal informatics.

• In the sixties, the DATUM project was conducted at the Faculty of Law with researchers from the CRDP. DATUM researchers developed one of the first automated retrieval systems for legal information in Canada. Professor Ejan Mackaay’s name is associated to almost all the papers published on DATUM’s work. Over time, by the mid-seventies, DATUM was to give way to SOQUIJ;
• In 1993, it is as an integral part of the CRDP that we initiated the publishing of Supreme Court of Canada for free on a Gopher server, to be completed a couple of months later by a web server (as we used to say a World-Wide Web server);
• In 1995, Lexum was established as a team to continue the exploration of the Internet’s potential for the dissemination of legal information (ten years later in 2005, Lexum was to become an independent research entity at the U. of Montreal, the LexUM Lab).
• In 2000, CanLII is launched by the Lexum group at the CRDP;
• In 2010, a new chair, the Legal information Chair, is established to ensure the long term continuation of research activities in the field of legal information and legal information systems;
• In 2010, professors Karim Benyekhlef and Nicolas Vermeys presided at the inauguration of a new law and technology laboratory, the Cyber Justice Laboratory, dedicated to ensuring the law will lead the technology and not the other way around.

Taken together, this rich history fully justifies celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the CRDP. However, legal informatics has not nearly been the only field explored at the Centre. Today, the CRDP’s work can be divided into three main areas: law, information and communications technologies; law, biotechnology and community; and, finally, law and new social relations. This multiple-pronged strategy and a multidisciplinary approach have always characterized the CRDP.

As Lexum’s President, and also as a member of the CRDP team, it is my pleasure to invite you to join me to wish a happy fiftieth anniversary to the Centre de recherche en droit public. Having led the major part of my career at the CRDP, I can testify that without the openness of mind so characteristic of CRDP, it would not be certain that innovations such as CanLII could have been possible in Canada.

Daniel Poulin

Last November, Lexum proceeded to survey the users of its Supreme Court of Canada decisions web site (scc.lexum.org/en). The results of such surveys are rarely shared; they can indeed have high commercial value or simply be embarrassing. The ones communicated here are not embarrassing and they are, at times, surprising. At least, they were not the ones Lexum was expecting. For instance, respondents are less eager to access legal content on mobile platforms than Lexum had initially assumed and their appetite for social web-related services appears much more limited than anticipated. In a more foreseeable way, respondents confirmed how the Canadian legal information market is today dominated by the free access to law movement. Here are some highlights from the results. Those interested in methodology will find some details at the end of this post.

Smart Phones and Tablets

Everybody knows that tablets – iPads I mean – are hot, very hot. At the Montreal Auto Show last weekend, all those staffing kiosks had one in hand. In few words, this year, iPads overcame cars at the show. Furthermore, we all enjoy our iPhones. They are cool. Recently, apps available for answering every imaginable need reached half a million. Clearly, if you are in the business of moving content, mobility is the way to go.

The Lexum 2011 survey data reveals a much less mobility-enthralled user base. The most popular demands for improvement were (1) comprehensiveness (all SCC decisions since 1876), (2) addition of hypertext link to references and (3) the addition of PDF versions faithful to the appearance of the Supreme Court Reports (since paragraphs were not numbered in older decisions, users need the page numbers to be able to cite). One must look towards the least chosen options to find the port to mobile platforms. Indeed, amazingly, “accessibility via mobile device” is at the ninth rank out of ten.

Even if we filter the results to consider only the younger respondents, those under 40, the priority for improvements remains essentially unaltered: the “kids” love more than anything else comprehensiveness, hyperlinking and PDFs. With this group of respondents, the mobile access option moves up only two ranks going from the 9^th to the 7^th priority. This comes as an agreeable surprise to Lexum, for it means that it can still discreetly jump on the mobility bandwagon.

Twitter and Facebook

Without a doubt, Lexum’s survival throughout the years does not owe much to its tweeting or cleaver uses of a Facebook page. In this world of hectic twittering and philandering expressions of “Like”-ing, Lexum has been at best a diffident participant. One of Lexum’s intentions with this survey was to give it the opportunity to take stock of its lateness and to help it catch up and find ways to start leveraging new media.

Again, respondents surprised Lexum with their answers; social media integration is the lowest of their priorities. Case in point, less than 4% of respondents chose “social media integration” despite the three chances they had to vote for it.

Slaw is not the forum to downplay the importance of collaboration and user-generated content. How then does one conciliate the usefulness of such forums, which appears so evident to many like me, with the weak demand for integrating social media to the Supreme Court of Canada decisions web site?

Could the notion of cognitive authority (introduced to our field by Professor Robert C. Berring) help explain this lack of interest? Respondents may have felt that the most authoritative content in law, the Supreme Court of Canada’s decisions, does not mix well with the musings one often reads on Twitter, Facebook and even more serious forums. It could be that for our users these other types of content do not register in the same spectrum of cognitive authority and they wisely prefer avoiding the intermingling of highly dissimilar genres.

Most of us, and probably most of Lexum’s users as well, would accept the idea that well designed social media-based environments can support the creation of valuable crowd-produced commentaries about legal issues. Perhaps the lukewarm reception of social media integration on the Lexum Supreme Court of Canada decisions web site can simply be explained by the lack of common knowledge about how social media can serve access to legal information. Nevertheless, the survey results invite the exercise of caution when introducing user-produced content to a site branded as authoritative.

A Distinct Way to Search for Legal Information

For reasons easy to understand, the survey was prepared in both languages and users were offered the choice of linguistic version. Nothing was expected from this very pragmatic arrangement. However, some differences were observed between the responses of the English and the French groups.

French speakers care more for the Supreme Court of Canada’s press releases than their English speaking equivalents (72% of French respondents say they consult them v. 49% of the English respondents). French speaking respondents are also three times more likely to appreciate SMS as a way to be informed of the arrival of new decisions on the Lexum site (11% v. 4%).

Proof that English and French minds don’t think alike, the approaches taken to find a case varies according to the language of the respondent. English respondents are especially fond of searching by case name where their French peers prefer using the reference to the official report. English users also seem more familiar with neutral citations than the French users.

(click on image to enlarge)

Fig 1: To the question “How do you search for information on Lexum’s Supreme Court of Canada decisions web site?” Each respondent picked three out of eight ways to find information on the Lexum site. English respondents’ answers are in blue, French respondents’ in red.

CanLII Leads

However you interpret them, the answers given by the respondents reveal that CanLII tops the market when it comes to accessing primary legal information. In one of its questions the survey asked users to identify their 3 favorite legal information sources out of 7 (5 out of 10 in Quebec, for there is a richer offer of legal information sources in Quebec). CanLII dominates the results across the board.

Both French (81%) and English (80%) respondents concur, making CanLII their favorite web site when looking for legal information. Filtering these results to consider only the lawyers among the respondents, the expressed preference for CanLII grows (E: 83%, F: 81%). Similarly, the younger clientele is slightly fonder of CanLII than the more general group of respondents (E: 83%, F: 84%). Even when one considers the respondents who indicate that they are users of the main commercial publisher of legal information outside of Quebec, respondents keep CanLII as their top favorite (79%) and say they visit it more often than their commercial provider. Similarly, in Quebec, when limiting the respondents to those who are users of the main commercial service here, they say they visit CanLII more often than the commercial provider and CanLII remains their favorite choice to the sound of 80%.

Best Search Tools According to Users

A well-crafted post must be somewhat self-serving; why, I ask you, would anyone participate in social web media otherwise? I am therefore pleased to say that survey respondents found CanLII’s search engine, designed by Lexum, the best on the market.

When bragging, a modest man must thrive to be brief. So, let’s go for it: overall, both English and French respondents, comparing Lexum’s search engine to all others legal information services (6 other choices in the survey for outside of Quebec, and 9 others for Quebec) chose the CanLII search tool as the best of the lot.

Final Thoughts

Lexum’s 2011 Supreme Court of Canada decisions web site survey brought with it some surprising results. It also confirms the place taken by the free access to law legal information sources in our country. It was a survey limited in scope. Many legal publishers and other actors in the arena of legal information survey the field regularly. Let’s hope that they will more regularly share their successes and also some of the facts collected. Our respondents merit as much.

Methodology

The invitation to participate in the survey was found on Lexum’s Supreme Court of Canada’s decisions web site (scc.lexum.org/en) and sent through the related e-mail distribution list, so it could be that the respondents come out of a group more interested in free access to law than the general body of legal information users. The survey itself was very short with only 20 questions. The questions first collected demographic information about respondents. The next group of questions related directly to the Lexum Supreme Court of Canada’s decisions web site: frequency of visits, web site uses, awareness tools preference and opinions on possible improvements. In the last four questions, the survey addressed the more general opinion about the whole of the Canadian legal information system: the respondents’ favourite sites for legal information, how frequently they visit them and which ones offer the best search tool. Finally, respondents were invited to share what they “dislike” about today’s legal information systems.

The survey was offered in both English (574 respondents) and French (224 respondents). In both groups, half of the respondents were lawyers and less than 5% defined themselves as being members of the ‘general public’. The other respondents identified themselves as being other legal professionals (15%), students (10%), academics, and so on. A little more than half were men. The age of respondents seems to be representative of the legal profession, 20% under 30, 25% between 30 and 40, 20% in their forties and 30% over 50. The others were over 65 or refused to answer. The jurisdictional distribution is also well spread out with 42% of the respondents from Ontario, 31% from Quebec, 10% from British Columbia and so on.

Lexum has been publishing the Supreme Court of Canada’s judgments since 1993. This initiative started free access to law almost twenty years ago in Canada. The service is now operated as a free access service by Lexum informatique juridique inc. It will be updated shortly with Lexum’s new Decisia publishing system.

Disclosure: Lexum operates the CanLII web site for the Federation of Law Societies of Canada under a service contract.

Daniel Poulin

Emma Elliott has contributed to the design of the survey.

Lexum has recently conducted an analysis of the underlying technology behind Facebook Like, Twitter Tweet and other “social” buttons. The analysis revealed that, if used in the way prescribed by Facebook, Google, Twitter et al., these buttons create some significant privacy issues for Webmasters and their users.

Before we get to the privacy issues however, it is appropriate to explain how these buttons work. Adding a Facebook Like, Twitter Tweet, Google +1, LinkedIn Share or any other sharing button to one's Web site is a relatively easy affair. The companies that distribute them have dedicated pages that explain how to do it. Typically, all a Webmaster has to do is to copy a snippet of HTML code into the appropriate Web pages.

Let’s use Google as an example. We’ll suppose that a Google +1 button is added to Lexum's front page at www.lexum.com in the way prescribed by Google at http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/ and that you happen to browse past our beautiful front page. When that happens, the Google code inserted in our front page causes your browser to load a JavaScript file from Google's servers. This JavaScript code displays the Google’s +1 button in the appropriate location in our front page. It is important to understand that this happens whether you click the button or not.

The implication of this is that every time you visit Lexum’s home page, Google’s button code will cause your browser to contact Google’s server, send Google’s cookies along with the URL of Lexum’s front page and store new Google cookies, if Google requests it. This allows Google to, if it chooses to do so, track your movement on every Web site that has integrated a Google +1 button.

Let me repeat this. When you visit a site with third party buttons (Like, Tweet, etc.), whether you click on them or not, whether you have accounts with these third party or not, every one of these third parties can trail where you are.

It is unknown what these companies do with this information: they may do nothing with it, retain it for future use or add it to the behavioural data they collect about their users. Given their reliance on advertising revenues and the importance of accurate user profiles to advertisers, the latter seems the likeliest.

Recently, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein banned the use of Facebook Like buttons in their jurisdiction over privacy concerns (1)(2). In order to comply with the ban, Heise modified Facebook's button implementation to inhibit user tracking by Facebook while still offering Like buttons on their Website. Facebook complained about the change to Heise, saying that it violated their policies governing the Facebook logo (3).

As of now, it seems that Facebook is much more aggressive in trying to prevent what Heise did than either of Twitter, LinkedIn or Google.

In order to deal with these privacy concerns, Lexum has created alternative versions of these buttons that do not contact third parties unless they are clicked. As far as we can tell however, we are a part of a very small minority of Webmasters who have taken the time to do so. Internet users who value their privacy should therefore be mindful that the vast majority of Websites with such buttons cause your browser to report your trail to the buttons' owners.

[I would like to thank Daniel Shane who clued me in about these privacy issues.]

______________________

1. http://siliconfilter.com/germany-vs-facebook-like-button-declared-illegal-sites-threatened-with-fine/
2. https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/presse/20110819-facebook-en.htm

3. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/german-website-creates-two-click-like-button-facebook-not-amused/3247

When referring to court or tribunal decisions in our daily lives, we generally use only the name of the main party or organization involved in the case. This “style of cause” or "case name" as we call it, doesn’t have to be unique in order to be specific: in any given legal context, the names of one or two main parties often suffice to refer to a decision, its full citation being used only in formal writings. Also, with electronic databases, we can afford to refer to only one decision and other decisions made in the same dispute are often within reach of our reader through citators.

What we call the "case name" has in fact become the "decision name", which doesn't have to contain identifying or case tracking information, because identification and case tracking does not depend upond the case name anymore. It has become much more easier to prepare at the source, by the court or tribunal. This has not always been the case.

The “CLIC Rules”

In the early 80’s, the Canadian Law Information Council (CLIC) noted that the "style of cause" was an important tool to locate decisions and track judicial history in law reports, and that the lack of consistency among those prepared by different publishers was therefore a significant hindrance to the reliability of legal research (see Lounder, Case law reporting in Canada, 1982 and Helleiner, Standards for headnoting: case identification, CLIC, 1984). To tackle the issue, the CLIC and major Canadian law publishers developed the Standard for Case Identification (1987), which is at the origin of the “Indexed as” entry used in case tables. These "CLIC rules" included the following:

• the basic entry is composed of the name of the first plaintiff followed by the name of the first defendant separated by “v.”;
• all decisions made in criminal cases are referred to by “R. v.” followed by the name of the accused, regardless of the status of the Crown;
• initials should be inverted so that the final initial appears first, e.g. C.(A.B.);
• certain terms such as “association” or “incorporated” should always be abbreviated;
• the case name used in the first trial court decision should be used for all decisions made in the same case, from the originating court or tribunal to the last appeal.

The last rule of this list, which can be called the "unique case name rule " provides a good example of the challenges experienced when implementing the CLIC rules. Even if it was never adopted (to my knowledge) in other countries including those sharing the common law tradition, this rule made sense. Major printed reporters, including the official FCR and SCR, agreed to implement it systematically. Easier retrieval and tracking of cases were the main expected benefits of this practice, along with the creation of more consistent case tables in law reports, with fewer cross-references. It nevertheless had several shortcomings:

• trying to predict was would be the first court decision of a case that originates from a board or tribunal is guesswork;
• the first trial court decision is not always reported at the time an appeal has to be reported;
• at various stages of the proceedings a party may cease to be part of the case or have a different role;
• cases are sometimes severed or joined together.

Despite these difficulties, the system was going to work relatively well in an environment where only a small portion of decisions were reported and carefully edited by law publishers. But throughout the 90's this environment changed dramatically.

Electronic Databases and Neutral Citation

After the CLIC was dissolved in 1992, the Standards for Case Identification were not revised so publishers were driven to bring their own variations to it. Parallel to that, courts and tribunals began to systematically publish decisions on their own websites, and started to assign case names based on various standards. Some elements of the CLIC rules survived this period, but many of them, such as the unique case name rule described above, proved to be too difficult to implement by many courts and tribunals.

Even from a law publisher's point of view, unique case names were not as beneficial as they were for the purpose of tracking decisions made in the same case, as reliable case history tracking tools were implemented in their electronic products. Also, full text search allows for retrieving decisions and cases by the name of any of the parties involved, even those not actually referred to in the case name.

Finally, the Neutral Citation Standard for Case Law (Canadian Citation Committee, 1999) has made case identification and retrieval much more easier and reliable than ever before. Adopted by all courts and many tribunals, the neutral citation allows for the unique identification of a decision, as soon as it is released and regardless of the specific database or report in which it is published.

Today, courts and tribunals can assign names to their decisions based on a very simple, manageable set of rules (see Canadian Citation Committee's The Preparation, Citation and Distribution of Canadian Decisions, 2009). What we called the "case name" has now become the name assigned to a single decision, just like authors assign titles to their texts. As such, the decision name doesn't have to refer to all decisions made in the same case or serve any other purpose beyond being concise and meaningful in a given context.

In 2011, there is no "correct" case name. The sole purpose of naming decisions is to provide a convenient mnemotechnical tool to be used by anyone wanting to informally refer to a decision. Consistency among publishers and authors should now be achieved by using the names courts and tribunals assign to their decisions.

Frédéric Pelletier, Lexum

The Law via the Internet 2011 International Conference will be held at the University of Hong Kong on June 9 and 10. This will be the eleventh international gathering of promoters of free access and innovation in legal publishing.

This year’s meeting will give a new opportunity to assess if Free Access to Law is here to stay? The published program seems to reveal expansion. No one can say for sure about the long term sustainability of free access, but after 20 years the number of countries where the approach is used continues to increase. The growth is especially important in Asia and Africa. This year’s conference will bring to the podium representatives from Hong Kong, Japan, India, Korea and Taiwan. African participants will come from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Morocco, Liberia and Sierra Leone. In these continents where access has traditionally been more difficult, numerous legal information institutes are currently being set up and various publishing initiatives are being launched. It appears that the Hong Kong Conference will be the ideal venue to take stock of the progresses made.

Some other papers will address technical issues related to law publishing on the Internet. The indexation of Chinese texts, a support system for translating Japanese law will be discussed. Sara Frug (Cornell) will present LII’s strategies to ensure high quality in their online US Code of Federal Regulations. From Canada, Morissette (Lexum) will address the issue of search engine speed, offering a glimpse under the hood of Lexum machinery to make CanLII the fastest show in town. Other Canadian contributions will see CAIJ and the Legal Information Research Chair of the University of Montreal addressing issues such as meeting lawyers’ needs and the management of the growing presence of multi-media content in judgments.

The continuing success of this cycle of conferences reflects the overall success in the development of legal information institutes around the world. This said, I believe that it could in large part be explained by the rarity of professional events for those involved in publishing the law. Most legal publishers have developed their processes and their systems internally and they consider related knowledge as commercial secrets. The Free Access to Law participants took another view. They meet in public events where lessons learned, best practices and other knowledge can be shared. It seems that this cycle of conferences will see a reinforcement of that role as a clearinghouse for legal publishing knowledge. If this turn toward a more technical content is successful, the next conferences will become a rallying point for a larger constituency, they can bring together a larger number of those interested by the future developments of legal information systems. More government participants and also more commercial legal publishers will take interest in these regular events for everybody’s benefit.

Daniel Poulin

Although most of us may not be concerned with rules governing alcohol consumption and fireworks or a combination thereof on a daily basis, municipal law impacts our lives quite frequently. 

Unfortunately, this is one area of law where efficient, free and public access is far from secured. The presence of municipalities on the web has significantly expanded and improved over the past several years, but publication of municipal by-laws seems to remain low on the priority list. When it is made available, municipal legal information is scattered, often out-of-date and is not easily searchable.

When driving on the Montreal roads dodging potholes the size of craters and zigzagging through never-ending roadwork, we may think that the city should have concerns other than the publication of its by-laws. However, access to municipal law, as access to law in general, is important for the transparency and accountability of our institutions and deserves to be given a higher priority. 

This is the thinking behind OyezOyez.ca. The website is a publishing platform for municipal by-laws, council meetings minutes and other public municipal stuff. It also offers portal functions allowing users to search existing municipal websites. Recently launched with Québec municipalities, soon our attention will expand east and west to include other provinces. Bélanger Sauvé, one of Quebec's leading municipal law firms collaborates with Oyez Oyez by providing news related to the transparency of municipal governance.

When speaking of free access, the implicit question is who pays for it? It is true that a working free access operation has to be based on a solid sustainable model. According to a recent study conducted in collaboration with other free access enthusiasts, free law publishing across the globe operates thanks to the efforts and capacity to innovate of small passionate organizations (LIIs) combined with the support of lawyers, donors, advertisers or any other group willing to provide the necessary resources.

With OyezOyez.ca, we will first knock on city hall doors. However, other models have not been ruled out. The important thing is to find a viable way to sustain public access to municipal law. As far as Lexum is concerned, the project will benefit from our past experience with free law publishing and a great deal of ideas driven by our thirst to innovate and our frustration with potholes. 

Ivan Mokanov

One of the skills that legal researchers and authors quickly have to master does not have anything to do with substantive law, but with how to refer to legal materials. This is true in many other areas of specialized knowledge, but citation standards in the legal realm seem to be particularly cluttered with minute details and exceptions, especially in Canada and the United States. Some of us eventually become quite skilled at knowing how to use square brackets, abbreviations and acronyms of legal authorities. The rest of us rely on proofreaders to make sure that every rule in the book has been complied with.

Last Summer, the 7^th edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (the “McGill Guide”) introduced this “General Rule” at p. E-3:

“In citations, omit periods when using an abbreviation or acronym, unless the Guide explains otherwise.”

The change entailed by this low key sentence has a very significant impact. Indeed, each and every example in the Guide is now free of the useless periods we have come to get used to. What a nice and overdue clean-up!

For those of us who developed the Neutral Citation Standard for Case Law, this orientation change of the McGill Guide felt like a modernization of the legal citation apparatus in Canada. It meant that from now on, the legal style would be aligned with the rest of our world, in which useless periods are not to be seen in acronyms anymore. Who types N.A.T.O., C.B.C. or N.H.L. when referring to these organizations? Nobody has the time to enforce a standard that is not useful. However, in the legal world we still type D.L.R., S.C.R., R.S.O., etc.

Major legal citation guides in the UK (OSCOLA, s. 1.3.1) and Australia (AGLC, s. 1.6.1) clearly forbid the use of “full stops” in abbreviations and initials found in citations. If you look in a law textbook published in these two countries you will not encounter many periods in citations, even when the topic is Canadian corporate law.

Here in Canada, serious people can seriously teach legal research without embellishing everything with useless periods. If you pay a visit to the Research Manual prepared by the staff of the Queen’s University Lederman Law Library, you will see for yourself that law students there learn to cite legal materials without periods. Do you think that these students at Queen’s will be disadvantaged for being entirely clueless about how people were using punctuation in the last century?

The undersigned called for this change many years ago, along with others, including here on Slaw. When the new edition of the McGill Guide was released, there were some discussion about the omission of periods, but now we fear that there could be a sense that the legal community is not ready yet.

Those of us who are ready for the jump – or more exactly who have been waiting for years for this particular jump – must seize every opportunity to speak out and clearly endorse a long overdue change on the path to the improvement of legal citation style in Canada.

These days, in committee rooms, the people responsible for the preparation of this year's law reports are thinking about what to do. For them, the choice is not clear yet. On the one hand, they can stick to tradition; nobody was ever fired for that. Tradition is good. On the other hand, they can modernize their citation style, but they are not even sure how this more risky tack will be received by their users and readers. This is why we are using this column as a podium to ask you to stand up and to encourage those decision-makers of the publishing industry to dare change timeless but useless practices.

We have an opportunity here. If we miss it, in five years’ time, lawyers and law librarians will tell each other that dropping the periods is impossible in Canada. They will say that this has been tried, but it has not worked, for the legal community loves periods. Everybody will continue to waste their time.

By Daniel Poulin and Frédéric Pelletier, Lexum

Last October, Les Publications du Québec — the official printer for Acts and regulations in that province — started to remove marginal notes from its newly updated consolidated legislation collection called “Compilation of Québec Laws and Regulations”. When an Act or regulation gets amended, all its marginal notes are now removed from the text. Marginal notes in Quebec legislation will therefore progressively fade out as consolidated texts are being updated.

Marginal notes are words and small phrases that were traditionally displayed in the margin of printed statutes, providing hints about the content of specific provisions. Modern typesetting conventions tend to put them not at the margin, but at the top of sections and subsections, as if they were small headings.

In some jurisdictions, marginal notes are part of the text as tabled at first reading (e.g. in the Federal House of Commons). In other jurisdictions like Quebec, they are added by the official printer only after Royal assent. Whatever the stage at which they are inserted in the text, however, marginal notes are deemed not to form part of the enactment as adopted by Parliament. They are provided “for convenience of reference only”, as most statutory interpretation legislation in Canada carefully put it.

Of course this status as a mere reference aid entails that a marginal note can’t be used as indicative of Parliament’s intent in the construction of statutes. For that reason and with very few exceptions (e.g. R. v. Wigglesworth, [1987] 2 S.C.R. 541, para. 19), we can consider that marginal notes have no legal value. But does that make them trivial?

The decision of Quebec’s official printer to remove marginal notes from its public enactments did not make the headlines in this province and only a few people noticed it, if any. There might have been good practical reasons for making such a decision from the official printer’s perspective. However, despite their low legal value, marginal notes are one of the most useful tools for finding relevant provisions, especially when used in tables of contents of more complex and lengthy pieces of legislation.

Marginal notes might be costly to prepare and maintain, but they are key to help readers – be them law professionals or members of the public – better understand the Law. Aren’t they worth the extra effort?

by Frédéric Pelletier, Lexum