Legal Research

New Supreme Court Website

By Simon Fodden

As Michel-Adrien Sheppard reported here last week, the Supreme Court of Canada has a newly refurbished website. It was in fact launched over the weekend and is now up and running.

I find the re-design an improvement: there’s a more open feel from a greater use of white and lighter colours. The old site had a tendency to feel a bit claustrophobic at times.

If you’d like to see how the site had changed over time, pay a visit to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, where there are S.C.C. pages from 1998 to the present. Sadly, the Wayback Machine does not always capture the images used to give a page colour and so much of what used to be the court site is lost. I have found four records from earlier times that show at least how far the Court — and the rest of us — have come, and I’ve put them into a small slideshow.

One potentially unfortunate aspect of the recent changes has to do with the fact that the Google links might no longer work. If you Google for the Supreme Court of Canada, you’ll likely come up with the old English welcome page at www.scc-csc.gc.ca/Welcome/index_e.asp, which now brings up a 404 error, because the new welcome page uses http://www.scc-csc.gc.ca/home-accueil/index-eng.asp. I haven’t checked to see if many bookmarked pages are affected in this way.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on September 08, 2008 (boomark / email).