Legal Research

Women?s Court of Canada - Le Tribunal des Femmes du Canada

By Michael Lines

Th WCC-TFC is on a western Canadian Tour. Details are hard to track down, but here are their destinations, and some dates.

• UBC, March 9
• UVic, March 11
• UAlberta
• U Calg, March 13
• U Sask.
• U Man. March 19

As a rock group they are pretty unplugged, but as a an educational experience, they… rock! Slaw has already covered their launch week in 2008, and explained the project, which is to re-write important SCC equality decisions from a more ‘context-aware’, if I may paraphrase, perspective.

It was interesting to hear about how the process of writing these decisions differed from the experience of academic work. As a librarian, I found the musings on this ‘new form of legal literature’ a highlight. The decisions of the WCC are intended, and used with success, as educational materials, but are primarily opportunities to create legal arguments that take into account not only the realities of particular cases, but to draw together the law and legal thinking in concrete ways that academic papers and the SCC do not, for a variety of reasons.

There are a few resources for learning more about the project, though none I could find are comprehensive: A Facebook page, the 2008 Conference page, a dedicated The Court page, an accessible online copy of Diana Majury, Introducing the Women’s Court of Canada 18(1) CJWL, 1, and of course the rest of that issue which includes all of the Court’s decisions to date.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on March 13, 2009 (boomark / email).