Bulletin #6
Canadian Committee for a neutral citation standard
Hello everyone,
Two important announcements before continuing on the results
of our last meeting:
1) Quebec's SOQUIJ supports our initiative for a neutral case
law citation standard and will include the new parallel
citations in its information products when courts provide
them with their judgements.
2) The conference call initially planned for next week
(May 10) will be held a week latter on May 17. The
additional week's time will give us all time to do our
homework and possibly we can have a couple more people
on the Committee by that time.
The updated version (1.1) of the working draft is now
available on the Web site.
Modifications already reported in our last message as well
as to sections 2.2.3, On separators, and 2.2.4.2, On
designating a province or territory, can be seen in the new
version of the working draft, as well as modifications to
section 2.1.3, On treatment of language, discussed below.
Section 2.2.4, On the use of existing standards, was split
and its introductory part was moved in section 2.1,
Architectural principles, to become section 2.1.2(iii),
while its subsections remain in section 2.2, The forms
of elements.
The complexity of the issues raised by section 2.1.3,
On treatment of language, brought the Committee to create
a subcommittee to deal with them. A request for a rewrite
of this section was formulated as it needing to be "split".
Rereading the section under this light, we realized the way
the issue of language could be dealt with is better expressed
in terms of explicitness and implicitness. Thus, language
can be indicated either explicitly, using a language code,
or implicitly, by having a different designation of a
tribunal for each language. We felt explicitness to be
preferable and that it should be dealt with at the level of
Architecture principles, and accordingly have drafted a
new sub-section of section 2.1, Architecture principles,
on explicitness.
Also, the language issue being the main difference
between Canada and other countries where a citation
standard is being considered, countries that are
unilingual, we felt that concern with compatibility
with a future international standard should be stressed
from the onset and that such a concern ought to be
formulated in such a way that the treatment of
language have as little an influence as possible on
the form of the core of the Canadian citation standard.
Accordingly, we have drafted a new sub-section of section
2.1, Architecture principles, on internationalization
that replaces section 4.1 of the first version of the
working draft.
Finally, section 2.1.3, On treatment of language, itself
was rewritten to take these modifications into account.
These modification also had to be reflected in sections
3 and 4 and changes there were made accordingly. Some
rewording was also done throughout the document so as to
retire references to the authors of the initial draft
and most of the references to the Committee itself, so
as to lighten up the text a little bit.
Remember, the next conference call is not next week,
but the week after, on Wednesday the 17 of June. This
way we all have a full week to get ready.
Regards to all.
Guy
--
Guy Huard huard@crdp.umontreal.ca
Editeur LexUM
Centre de Recherche en Droit Public
Universite de Montreal
http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/
Tel: +1 (514) 343-7853
Fax: +1 (514) 343-7508