The 9th edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (better known as the McGill Guide) was published earlier this summer. The most important change was no longer requiring a parallel citation in addition to a neutral citation. While the guide tends to be the default for Canadian citation, several courts have slightly different citation requirements:

• The Alberta Queen’s Bench adopted the 7th edition of the McGill Guide with some minor changes as detailed in its Notice to the Profession, November 12, 2013.
• British Columbia’s Court of Appeal has also adopted the 7th edition of the McGill Guide

Did you know that you can receive instant notifications every time a new case is added to CanLII simply by subscribing to an RSS feed?  Would you like to monitor all new decisions from a particular level of court or administrative tribunal?  An RSS feed can do that for you.

RSS feeds deliver instant updates that inform you whenever a website is updated.  In CanLII’s case, they will alert you whenever a new decision is posted.

Our colleagues at the Law Society of Manitoba Library have put together an excellent guide that describes how to Create an Alert with CanLII…

The latest in a continuing series.

Next time: guidance for the reluctant legal blogger

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)…

Not hats: capital letters (or, in typographical parlance, upper case).

Don’t shout at people

When the interweb and e-mail were new, it took (some) people a while to figure out that typing your message all in caps is the typographical equivalent of shouting. Compare: please don’t forget to do this (gentle reminder) versus PLEASE DON’T FORGET TO DO THIS (angry, hectoring, perhaps a bit desperate, possibly crazy).

Used sparingly, capitals can be an effective way to express emphasis (especially if you’re not typing in HTML or rich text) – but the key word here is ‘sparingly’; if everything is emphasised, …

As mentioned earlier this year, CanLII has been adding secondary materials to its database. If you’re looking for recent articles from Canadian law journals, CanLII now offers access to sixteen journals:

• Alberta Law Review
• Appeal: Review of Current Law and Law Reform
• Canadian Bar Review
• Canadian Journal of Comparative and Contemporary Law
• Canadian Journal of Human Rights
• Canadian Law Library Review
• Canadian Parliamentary Review
• Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies
• LawNow Magazine
• Manitoba Law Journal
• McGill Journal of Dispute Resolution
• McGill Journal of Law and Health
• McGill Journal of Sustainable Development Law
• Ottawa Law Review
• University of New Brunswick

There is a distinct love-hate relationship between the English and French languages. We’ve borrowed a lot from the French over the years, with mixed results.

All of this goes back a long way (1066, and all that), but shows no sign of abating.

French words we’ve more or less naturalised

There are some borrowings from French that we don’t even think about, because they’ve become fully anglicised, sometimes with changes in spelling: apartment, baton, hotel, parliament.

Sometimes we try to make anglicised French words more French again, for example when we pronounce niche like NEESH, instead …

In honour of the Charter’s 35^th anniversary, the Department of Justice released the online Charterpedia. As noted on the site:

This Charterpedia provides legal information about the Charter and contains information about the purpose of each section of the Charter, the analysis or test developed through case law in respect of the section, and any particular considerations related to it. Each Charterpedia entry cites relevant case law, and citations to Supreme Court of Canada decisions are hyperlinked whenever possible.

It contains a wealth of information about the Charter by section, including info on similar provisions, purpose, and detailed …

An assistant called me recently, asking whether the other side on a transaction was correct to keep inserting an extra L every time the word instalment appeared in an agreement.

The traditional/British spelling is with only one L; the Yanks now generally use two – so I told the assistant to stick to her guns if she felt strongly about it.

Similarly, the classic spellings are fulfil and fulfilment – but one increasingly sees a doubling of the second L in both. Fulfill is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary Online only in the usage examples up to about 1600, …

While some of the paid tax resources provide reference tables that show what stage a proposed amendment to the Income Tax Act has reached, how do you figure this out if you don’t have access to one of these resources?

Step 1: What draft legislation are you interested in? Generally tax legislation is published as a “Notice of Ways and Means Motion” before it is introduced as a bill. The Department of Finance Canada provides a listing of all the Notice of Ways and Means Motions back to 2013 at https://www.fin.gc.ca/legislation/draft-avant-eng.asp. You can also find them on Taxnet Pro …

Linguistic redundancy, not the employment variety. In the linguistic category, there are both legal and non-legal redundancies.

The legal

We’ve seen these before (see ‘Gruesome twosomes‘), but they bear repeating.

Legalese is replete with pairs of words that mean the same thing and therefore don’t need to be used together (except to create a leaden, lawyerly effect).

Examples:

• cease and desist [how about plain old stop?]
• free and clear [one or t’other, not both]
• full and complete [same comment]
• if and when [ditto]
• null and void [just say of no effect]
• of no force or effect