Bulletin #8
Canadian Committee for a neutral citation standard
Hello everyone,
We had 13 people on the call Wednesday; only Maria
Cece of the Ontario Court of Appeal was unavailable. New
participants were Diane Hanson of the Law Society of New
Brunswick, Denis Le May of the Laval University Library,
and Paule Morissette, of the McGill Law Journal.
After openings remarks, the conference president
pointed out that one item on the to do list from the previous
teleconference was still pending: writing a document on
the advantages of the standard for commercial law publishers.
Daniel Boyer's report on the recent CALL convention
noted the extremely positive response to the report on our
Committee's activities, although at least one representative
of the legal publishing industry was less than enthusiastic
about our work. The Web site's URL was disseminated at large.
AALL (American Association of Law Libraires) representatives,
who where also at the Toronto summit last November, where
interested in the way the Committee has been able to organize
its work and want to follow our model for their own work on
authentication.
Daniel Poulin, the Committee's co-ordinator, then
reviewed the work plan for the coming period until the target
ACCA (Association of Canadian Court Administrators)
convention September 21-23. The next teleconference and last
of the current series will be held July 9th and should enable
us to conclude our work on the working draft.
The first version of the standard proper will then
be drafted and ready for the Committee's review by August 7.
It will also be submitted to the projects' sponsors, others
having hopefully by then joined the Federal Dep't of Justice.
A teleconference on August 19, less than two weeks latter,
will enable us to further discuss this draft standard. The
resulting version of the draft standard should be ready in
time for the CBA (Canadian Bar Association) and FLSC
(Federation of Law Societies of Canada) conventions in
St-John, Nfld, August 23. From then on and including the
ACCA convention the standard will be largely disseminated
to legal documentation circles, including commercial
publishers.
Version 1.1 of the working draft was then commented.
Ruth Rintoul pointed out that it was inexact to say in section
2.1.3 that both language version have the same official status.
It is only true for the Supreme Court. For other tribunals,
the translation of a judgment is noted as such and doesn't
have the same status as the one in which judgment was
rendered. Otherwise, a new proposal, 2.4.i, on separators,
will replace question 2.3. Both modifications will be included
in version 1.2 of the working draft.
The next item on the agenda was that of the language
issue and tribunal identifiers. The language issue in the
tribunal identifiers themselves has been dealt with by the
subcommittee and the result of their discussion posted on the
Citation list. Basically, identifiers in officially bilingual
jurisdictions (federal courts and New Brunswick) should also
be bilingual, joining identifiers in each official language
by a separator. Citations of judgments by courts of these
jurisdictions would always carry a language code. In other
jurisdictions, that are unilingual, the tribunal identifiers
remain unilingual and no language code is necessary if the
judgment is in the official or majority language of the
jurisdiction.
The Committee was pleased with the work already done,
but some requested more time to think about it. It will be
discussed further in the next teleconference, along with
proposals 2.1.2 (iii), on the use of existing standards
and 2.2 (iv), on the location of the language code within
the tribunal element.
Section 3 of the working draft, the other main item
on the agenda was discussed next. Its section 3.1, the year
of the decision, 3.2, the tribunal identifier and 3.3, the
ordinal number of the decision, where the object of heated
debate. It boiled on to what to date and number, and how.
Some said all judgments, not only those by which a
court closes a case but all intermediary judgments as well,
should be numbered, while others said this, although desirable
in principle, would represent too heavy a workload. It was
stated, as a matter of principle in favour of the most
inclusive option of numbering all decisions, that the
editorial decision to eventually publish or not should be
the court's. Since court circumstances and resources vary,
it was finally decided to leave it to courts to decide.
Martin Felsky proposed that a standard shouldn't have an
economic obstacle making it inapplicable in all case,
so our citation standard should recommend the numbering of
all decisions when feasible, but it would be up to courts
to see when they can implement such a recommendation. It
should be noted here that this point should progressively
become moot as courts adopt automatic management systems,
as some have started doing already.
Also, numbering doesn't have to be in compliance
with the chronological order in which decisions are rendered.
An oral decision that is written down latter on would get its
citation when released in written form, the year being that
of when it was first rendered, and the ordinal number the
next available one in the series of that year.
How to number judgments dealt with both tribunal
identifiers and numbering schemes. It was quickly agreed that
if the goal of the standard is to identify, it's not necessary
to add subdivision identifiers to tribunal elements. However,
if a tribunal considers it necessary to mark a distinction
between its subdivisions, that can be easily be done through a
numbering scheme. Also, a decentralized numbering scheme is
the solution for complex distributed tribunals. Proposal 3.1
regarding the numbering of judgments is already worded to
that effect.
Finally, paragraph numbering was quickly dealt with.
The issue of what symbol to use to designate paragraph numbers
was denounced by Denis Le May as moot, since these numbers
would obviously be paragraph numbers in the first place. We'll
have to come back to this.
Looking at section 4 that will be discussed next time,
it can be seen that question 4.2, on chambers, subdivisions
and judicial districts, has been answered. Also, section 2.1.3 on
treatment of language will be discussed some more on the
July 9 teleconference. It can also be seen from that the issue
of separator should have been kept for last and so will probably
have to be revisited, albeit briefly.
*****
The above discussion on the standard is reflected in
the new version 1.2 of the working draft, soon to be posted
on the Web site, by a number of modifications to version 1.1.
More specifically, section 2.1.3, on treatment of
language, has been revised to more accurately reflect the
reality of the official status of language versions, and a
new proposal, 2.2(v), drafted to reflect the conclusions of
the sub-committee on treatment of language. New proposal
2.4(i), on separators, answers and replaces question 2.3.
New proposal 3.0, on the year of the decision, answers
and replaces question 3.1. New proposal 3.0(i), on the
tribunal identifiers, replaces and answers question 2.1,
reflecting work done by the sub-committee. Section 3.3, on
the ordinal number of the decision, has been revised to
reflects conclusions drawn in the teleconference, and new
proposal 3.1(i) drafted to that effect. Question 3.2, on
paragraph information, has been revised to reflect discussions,
but not replaced by a proposition, because some ambiguity
on that issue remains.
Section 4.3, on chambers, subdivisions and judicial
districts has been revised according to conclusions reported
above and new proposal 4.2 drafted to that effect to replace
question 4.2. Finally, new proposal 4.3 answers and replaces
question 4.5 to frame a proposal already in the text of
section 4.6, on references to notes.
*****
After this noteworthy writing effort, yours truly feels
taking a holiday is the reasonable thing to do, and so will be
out of reach until Monday July 6th, bright and early.
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