Legal Research

Annotated Civil Code

By Simon Fodden

LexUM has released a digital, annotated version of the Quebec Civil Code. With this release the Code for the first time obtains a hyperlinked table of contents, which even the version on the LexUM supported CanLII lacks. But the new LexUM version offers much more: each section is seeded with caselaw annotations extracted from CanLII and may be further annotated by viewers; there’s an “[add]” button at the bottom of the screen that in good AJAX fashion opens out a form to receive the relevant data about a case. As well there’s an “[annotate]” button allowing the viewer to add text commentary about a particular case annotation.

At the moment, according to LexUM’s Ivan Mokanov, all viewer annotations and comments are going to be moderated. It hasn’t been decided whether this filtering will continue. And they’re also considering whether to continue allowing anonymous annotations or to require annotaters to sign in.

This is a welcome experiment beautifully executed. LexUM/CanLII continues to be the centre of innovation in using the web to provide open access to our law.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 17, 2009 (boomark / email).