Deep Links to CanLII

To continue the theme from the last couple of weeks, Today’s Tip is about linking in to CanLII.  The tips for WestlawNext Canada and LexisNexis Canada have been about linking to a specific source within the services and that makes sense for CanLII as well.

Stable, predictable, readable URLs are one of the truly wonderful things about CanLII.

What is the start page for searching Statutes and Regulations of Alberta?

http://www.canlii.org/en/ab/laws/index.html

How about Ontario legislation?

http://www.canlii.org/en/on/laws/index.html

The legislation of Manitoba?

http://www.canlii.org/en/mb/laws/index.html

The pattern for decisions is also very predictable and stable. The case R. v. Smarch which is cited 2015 YKCA 13 has this link:

http://www.canlii.org/en/yk/ykca/doc/2015/2015ykca13/2015ykca13.html

Following the logic it is  CanLII website/reading language/jurisdiction/neutral cite for the court/ doc /year of decision/neutral citation/ and finally neutralcitation.html

The /doc/ part of the pattern is a static reference and except for that, everything after the language choice flexes with the decision. Citing a bunch of Court of Appeal decisions and want to make hyperlinks to CanLII from your document? You don’t have to find the decisions, and then copy and paste CanLII URLs, just locate the first one and copy and edit parts the citation to do the linking task quickly.

This works particularly well if you are linking to sections of legislation. The pattern for that is also predictable for legislation on CanLII that has the “Show Table of Contents” feature.  Here is a link to section 1 of the most recent Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, SC 1996, c. 19:

http://www.canlii.org/canlii-dynamic/en/ca/laws/stat/sc-1996-c-19/latest/sc-1996-c-19.html#sec1

Guess what the link to section 2 is.

There are also CanLII related tools, like LexHub, to help with linking to bunches of cases from your work product for even speedier mashups.