The Financial and Consumer Affairs Authority of Saskatchewan (FCAA) recently launched a new legal guided pathway and online dispute resolution platform to resolve consumer disputes. I had the privilege of working with the FCAA Consumer Protection Division team to develop the legal guided pathway portion of the project called Consumer Rights. This includes twelve dispute areas ranging from auctions to vehicle dealers.

The goal of the Consumer Rights pathway is to help consumers and businesses resolve issues in a fast, efficient and fair manner. It is an interactive pathway that takes the user through a series of questions and . . . [more]

In “Open Access & Legal Scholarship” Revisited: Part I, Hannah revisited John Bolan’s “exceptions to the exception” of the lack of open access (OA) in law. She considered the success story of CanLII, commercial repositories, increased interdisciplinarity, and the access to justice movement. In part II we would like to consider some of the factors that have contributed positively to the growth of the “exceptions to the exception” but also note the challenges they raise for the future.

Many experts in the field have examined the broader trends in OA. For a comprehensive review on where Canada stands on . . . [more]

If you want a read a web page but it isn’t loading, you can look at the cached version on Google. Google makes a copy of each web page it indexes so that it can be used as a backup. 

You can access Google’s cached version in one of two ways. 

If you found the page through a Google search, simply click on the three dots next to the search result and then click on the button that says “cached”.

Alternatively, if you have the URL, go to Google and enter the link preceded by cache:, e.g. cache:https://www.gazette.gc.ca/accueil-home-eng.html. . . . [more]

I believe that a professor should always be on the lookout for innovative and enticing ways to engage students in class. The more a professor finds inspiring and captivating ways to convey a message or introduce new content, in my experience, the more students interact with the information in class and participate in the discussions.

Basically, this is the philosophy that prompted me to contact our law school’s media department and ask to use their fancy green room for my Foreign, Comparative and International Legal Research class. Despite my initial apprehension, the team gave me full liberty and my . . . [more]

Over the years I’ve spoken with many people who believe they “have a book in them” or an idea for a book. But to take liberties paraphrasing Stephen Fry’s protagonist in The Hippopotamus: books aren’t made up of ideas, they’re made up of words.

So how do you string those words together at scale?

Firstly, I’d like to encourage you to reconsider. Writing a book is difficult, and it means spending pretty much all your spare time for a year or so working, and the remuneration is almost never good. Almost everyone I’ve spoken with gets more return doing . . . [more]

This may sound like a very niche question, but it was one where the answer was not immediately obvious. (The short answer, as it turns out, is “Saskatchewan, The Queen’s Bench Rules” or “Saskatchewan, The Court of Appeal Rules”.)

While the McGill Guide explains how to cite rules of court, it does not include the Saskatchewan rules in its examples. McGill suggests including the indexing information, but the Saskatchewan rules are not regulations (unlike the court rules in other jurisdictions.)

According to the extremely helpful Ann Marie Melvie, the librarian at the Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan: . . . [more]

This submission is part of a column swap with the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) bimonthly member magazine, AALL Spectrum. Published six times a year, AALL Spectrum is designed to further professional development and education within the legal information industry. Slaw and the AALL Spectrum board have agreed to hand-select several columns each year as part of this exchange. 

Lessons from the SCALES OKN Project, Including its Cost, Data, and Development Challenges

With the increasing availability of electronic court records, many law librarians have seen more requests from their patrons to pull data from those records to answer . . . [more]

A New Year Has Begun! And good legal information keeps on coming from the law librarians at the Law Library of Congress. Here are some notes from the latest releases:

January 9th, Congress.gov top 22:

“We are always working to incorporate your feedback into making Congress.gov an even better experience. One major request was one of the biggest items that the Congress.gov team worked on last year: the new Congress.gov API (application programming interface).”

January 12^th, Foreign Legal Gazette update:

“In fall 2022, the Law Library of Congress added foreign legal gazettes for the countries of Niger,

It is occasionally difficult to convince students of the wonder of research: you never know what you might find! At the same time, students who believe in that wonder sometimes believe that there can be no method at all, as magical research results must only lie at the end of long and tortuous journeys which can never be repeated or described. I believe that there are methods and patterns to research, but I also know that even while following simple principles the path of research often feels twisty. The One Good Case method is one of the simple principles that . . . [more]

While British legislation is now cited in the format Northern Ireland Act 1998 (UK), s 5, pre-1963 legislation (which is more likely to be referred to in Canadian courts than the newer legislation) is slightly more complicated. ¹

Older British legislation is cited using a regnal year, e.g. Statute of Frauds, 1677, 29 Car II, c 3. The regnal year consists of the shortened version of the monarch’s name (in this case Car II for Charles II where “Car” is the shortened version of Carolus, the Latin for Charles) preceded by a number or numbers indicating the . . . [more]

In my current and previous positions, I have worked closely with numerous researchers searching for any type of legal information from foreign countries or other domestic jurisdictions. Despite their different requests, one thing is a constant: legal research on a foreign/domestic jurisdiction requires a research strategy. Even if you believe that you are “just” looking for a case, piece of legislation, policy, regulation, historical information, etc., once your legal research includes another domestic jurisdiction, you need to spend some extra time thinking about a series of questions which go beyond the “document” you are interested in. Those questions include, not . . . [more]

In 2011, the TALL Quarterly published a brief article authored by John Bolan, Public Services Librarian at the Bora Laskin Law Library (University of Toronto). The article addressed the burgeoning open access movement for scholarly literature generally, with a focus on the lack and lag of open access literature within the discipline of law and potential areas of growth in the field. Bolan wrote, “As befits the field of law, there are, however, exceptions to the exceptions that are worth noting.” With more than 10 years since Bolan’s article was published, this post reviews the exceptions highlighted as potential areas . . . [more]