Legal Research

Live blogging from CanLII meeting

By Simon Fodden

I’m at the CanLII meeting at Osgoode Hall here in Toronto to learn more about their new legislation database. At the moment the speakers are thanking their funders.

Ivan Mokanov is presenting SATO, section and time-based operations. The first simple demo called up the Human Rights Code that was in force on a given date. Above the text of the legislation is a linked list of all possible versions, making comparison easy. The screen will print properly with sections aligned.

Any statute or section can be noted up. (Results can be refined by narrowing searc terms.)

The third tab of the box above an act shows you the associated regs.

There’s an RSS feed link for every statute that will notify you of any updates.

Pierre Paul presented CanLex, which represents a middle ground between CanLII and LexUM. It deals with APIs, such as that for Reflex. We saw him use that to add links to a course syllabus. Links are inserted in CanLII format. But the real strength of CanLex lies in using an account to get your machines to use the API to talk to it and perform more automatic functions, particularly through integration with your copy of Word.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on February 11, 2009 (boomark / email).