Hot TOCs in CanLII
I don’t know how long this has been going on, but some courts are sending judgments to CanLII with hyperlinked tables of contents. Plain old text TOCs are nothing new, of course: long — long, long. . . — judgments pretty much demand them. But courts seem to have discovered that, because they create and submit their judgments to CanLII in MS Word format, it’s fairly easy to construct a hyperlinked table of contents.
A search for [table of contents] turns up recent “hot” TOCs from Newfoundland and Labrador, British Columbia, and Ontario.
This is, of course, a welcome trend, if trend it is. Now all we need in our open access judgments is hyperlinks back to the TOC from within the document, links to each paragraph to enable precise citation, hyperlinked citations . . . and a few other features besides.
Maybe not all good? The switch from typewriting to word processing seems to be blamed for the ever expanding average judgment length. Being able to hyperlink even more text might make the length of judgments that much longer in the future…
Simon,
I’m not sure it’s all that recent, though I hope its becoming more common.
Looking for something else, I just stumbled across a 2006 case with hyperlinks between table of contents and sections. Morgan v. City of Toronto, 2006 CanLII 41574. Unfortunately, it, like the 3 you mention link only for movement from TOC to section. There’s no link back. If, in fact, the judges clerical staff are doing this, then I wonder why there’s not even a bookmark back to the table of contents heading. It could be reused at each section heading.