RefLex
My attention was drawn to a question about Immigration and Refugee Board decisions today, one of the many areas of law about which I know nothing. I learned that some IRB decisions are reported in Lexis/Quicklaw’s Immigration Law Cases and WestlaweCarswell’s Immigration Law Reporter, and that the best online source is RefLex, a database available on the IRB site. RefLex makes available a selection of digested facts and decisions from among the thousands of cases, with no report of the legal analysis or argument, the principal aim of which is to inform Board members of what their colleagues have decided.
Another online tool for those interested in refugee law can be found at the University of Michigan Law School’s Refugee Caselaw Site. This is an international database of top court cases from Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
My first reflex was a double-take when I saw this. CANLII is also using the name RefLex for its case law citation resolution product: http://www.canlii.org/reflex_en.html . Uh oh…
When I read > I think of the Findings from the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at http://www.privcom.gc.ca/cf-dc/2005/index2-5_e.asp which are also softer law in the sense of being aimed at the individual fact situations rather than building up a coherent set of more general norms. Is trend presenting problems for legal researchers who will be less able to opine definitively on what “the law” on atopic is. Speaking of the Privacy Commissioner’s site, whoever designed the Advanced Search interface at http://www.privcom.gc.ca/cf-dc/search_e.asp deserves praise. Intelligent way to navigate through the corpus of findings.