Posted in:
Retiring an Old Friend
It was with mixed feelings we have “retired” our All England Law Reports – Canadian Annotations to the Consolidated Tables and Index looseleaf but it just wasn’t being used.
It was a great product that provided a list of U.K. cases reported in the All England Law Reports showing which Canadian court decisions had considered those U.K. decisions. Its strength was quality of entries. However, its time has likely come given the ease by which one can search on the name of the U.K. case (e.g., jarvis /4 swan) in a Canadian full-text judgments database to get a more exhaustive listing of Canadian cases that have considered the U.K. decision.
Actually Ted, this service did have a use that is NOT caught by running a search through Canlii on names from the style of cause. It’s the assessment of how significant the reference was.
English and Canadian research tools take completely different views about the importance of a case being referred to in a second case. Services like the Abridgment are much more like a Canlii search on party names – there are very many cases cited, lots of which tend to be in passing citation references.
English tools tend to require much more profound consideration of the prior case before they are worth referring to.
That distinction is why the Current Law Citator is a single volume and the Abridgment CJS is four linear feet.
The All ER Canadian Converter was a service I could rely on to give me different, slightly more focused results than other Canadian sources. And it was better for results from the 1936 to 1986 period, when online databases became more comprehensive.
It’s still distressingly true that the fact that each service gives us different results means that they are applying different criteria to different data sets.