If I had a dollar for every time he’s heard Good, thanks – and you? in response to How are you?, I’d be writing this from a villa in Tuscany. (Or not writing it all, just sipping Negronis on a deck-chair by the pool.)

The grammatically correct response to how are you? is well, not good. Good traditionally refers to a moral, not a physical or mental, state. I’m good really ought to be confined to situations where you mean you are virtuous, good at something or well-behaved. (And not as a way of saying ‘no, thank …

This tip was suggested by Marnie Bailey of Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP.

Unlike the vast majority of Canadian regulations, you can’t find a consolidated version of the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Regulations on the federal Justice Laws website; instead the Justice Laws website refers you to Transport Canada’s website. While Transport Canada has a copy of the current consolidated version, it does not make previous versions available on its website, so what is a law librarian to do? Head to the Wayback Machine of course!

There is a lovely capture of how the Regulation read right before a major …

You knew this would come up sooner or later.

The simple rule is that who is a subject (Who said that?), whom is an object (To whom is that letter addressed?). The verb to be, you will remember, takes a subjective completion (who) rather than an object (whom).

But it’s a bit more complicated than that.

First, who has largely displaced whom in common usage, to the point where the Oxford English Dictionary admits that it is ‘no longer current in natural colloquial speech’. As a result, one usually hears It’s …

Each month, the University of Saskatchewan’s Native Law Centre blog features a Case Watch.    The Case Watch is a newsletter of digested aboriginal case law.  It covers all aspects of aboriginal case law including title, rights and Gladue factors.  It is a collaboration of the Native Law Centre and Pro Bono Students Canada – University of Saskatchewan Chapter.

If you are a practitioner of aboriginal law or you closely follow this area of law, we strongly encourage you to check out Case Watch!

[This tip by Alan Kilpatrick originally appeared on the Law Society of Saskatchewan Library’s Legal …

The word hyphen comes from the Greek for together, which reflects the hyphen’s function as a connector. Dash is descriptive: it’s a bold stroke of punctuation, which can hive things off from each other as well as connect otherwise disparate elements.

The hyphen as connector
English, like German, likes to combine two or more words into one. The Germans just shove them all together, stringing a series of words into one long chain (Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz apparently being the longest; it means ‘beef-labelling supervision duties delegation law’, formerly in the statute book of the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, but now …

The trouble with using keywords when searching case law case law is that you can end up with a lot of false hits, particularly in situations where your search terms have multiple meanings or are commonly used. One solution is to limit your search to digests or headnotes. When you search digests or headnotes, it increases the probability that your search terms will return a relevant case. Limiting your search to a specific category of cases (e.g. bankruptcy and insolvency) is also a good way to reduce the number of false hits.

— Susannah Tredwell…

I wish people would think about the placement of the single word only. Where it falls in your sentence can have a crucial effect on meaning. Only feels lonely because it’s often in the wrong place at the wrong time, misused and misunderstood.

Consider these examples (devised by James Forrest, emeritus professor, Department of English, U. of Alberta):

He only told her that he loved her
He told only her that he loved her
He told her only that he loved her
He told her that only he loved her
He told her that he only loved her
He …

The Law Society of Saskatchewan Library team has created a series of helpful tutorial videos to aid legal researchers in searching CanLII and the Saskatchewan Cases Search.  You can watch the videos by clicking on the Library Tutorials button on the left side of the library homepage.

The short digestible videos demonstrate how to search each resource in key ways:

CanLII Tutorial Videos

1. A Basic “How-To” (5:57) [embedded above]
2. Searching for a Case with a Common Name (3:08)
3. Noting Up a Case with CanLII (2:22)
4. Searching for Case Law (2:04)
5. Searching for Legislation (2:44)

Saskatchewan Cases Search Tutorial …

A few more words about would. (For previous advice, see Shall, will, should, would, may, might, must.)

Would is, of course, the conditional form of will. It’s used to express a potential (or non-existent) rather than a certain future state of being.

So it’s I will have the memo for you today but I would like to give you the memo today, but I’ve been asked to work on a big due diligence project instead.

Relatively straightforward, one would think – but one would be wrong.

Tense accord
No, not …

(This tip is courtesy of Bronwyn Guiton.)

Librarians are frequently asked to provide lists of legislation from across Canada. To save time answering these kinds of questions, keep a handy list of the provinces and territories in the Notes tool in Outlook. Then when you are asked these kinds of questions you can just paste this list into your email or Word document, saving time and effort.

— Bronwyn Guiton…