Zotero: Canadian Legal Style Available
Earlier this month a certain Liam McHugh-Russell uploaded a functional Canadian Legal Style to Zotero’s style library here.
Look for the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, 7th ed. (McGill Guide), Liam’s style handles secondary sources perfectly, as far as I can tell, and performs well for cases and legislation.
When I asked him about the style, he did note that, due to the variety of formats in which citations to cases and legislation are offered online, the style cannot guarantee seamless downloading of citations to primary resources.
That said, I was able to extract a citation from CanLII, and with a bit of fiddling, produce this result in a footnote:
Canada (Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness) v Fabien, 2011 FC 472 (available on CanLII)
Which is pretty close to perfect. I had to remove a period after the v. supplied by CanLII, copy the complete neutral citation into the Reporter field, eliminate the content of the Date Decided field, and change the URL to “CanLII.” Still, mutatis mutandis, I can now cite this decision accurately at the click of a button.
Thanks Liam. This is a very welcome contribution.
If you can provide concrete feedback on the issues you encounter saving legal resources from web sources, please post them to the Zotero forums and we’ll see what we can do to address them. I know that the legal realm is just aching to see Zotero work for it, and the volunteers who make the project run, including me, are eager to provide.
What about de-italicising “v”? :O
If you put the “v” in tags in Zotero, it should show up as non-italic in the actual citation, since Zotero does flip-flopping of italics and some similar things.
tags, that should be.
Argh. Those should be italics tags, like in HTML. Your comment box won’t let me enter them!