Minutes of the May 25, 2009 Meeting

Attendees:

CCC members:

Daniel Poulin, Louise Hamel, Anne Van Iderstine, Alisa Posesorski, Ruth Rintoul, Elizabeth M.A. Turgeon.

Guests:

John Davis (Osgoode, York Univ.), Denis LeMay (Univ. Laval, retired), Elizabeth Bruton (Univ. of Western Ontario), Cheryl McPherson (CLB), Michael Jones (CLB)

Thise meeting meeting co-chaired by Daniel Poulin and Ruth Rintoul was held as one of the CALL Conference 2009 business meeting at the Westin Hotel in Halifax. It began at 10:45 a.m. ADT.

Agenda:

1. Background and present status of new Standards document;
2. Case Naming Toolkits for Canadian jurisdictions;
3. Removal of extraneous punctuation from Canadian legal citations;
4. Standards for hyperlinks (John Davis).

The notes for these minutes were taken by Ruth Rintoul.

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1. New Standards document

(Daniel Poulin)

1.1 Our new standard entitled The Preparation, Citation and Distribution of Canadian Decisions was approved by the Canadian Judicial Council on May 7, 2009.

1.2 On May 22, 2009, Frédéric Pelletier posted RTF and PDF versions on the CCC website at: http://www.lexum.org/ccc-ccr/preparation/en/

1.3 The Case Naming Guidelines are also available at: http://www.lexum.org/ccc-ccr/cn/en/

1.4 A letter will be circulated in the next few weeks to Chief Justices and court administrators to alert them about the new document.

2. Case Naming Toolkits for all Canadian jurisdictions

(Ruth Rintoul)

2.1 During the drafting of the Case Naming Guidelines, it was suggested that it would speed the work of court and tribunal staff (who are responsible for creating the short Case Names for decisions before their release to the public) if they had access to comprehensive lists of public entities for each jurisdiction in Canada.

2.2 These Case Naming Toolkits would indicate the correct form of the name of the entity to be included in the short Case Name (especially whether the entity name requires the inclusion of the Jurisdiction name).

2.3 Toolkits for the following jurisdictions are complete or substantially complete: Canada (federal government), Alberta, and Nova Scotia. Good progress has been made on the BC Toolkit. This work is being done by Ruth Rintoul -- she reported that she had been unavailable to work on the Toolkits for 3 months but would resume the work within 3 weeks. A project is underway on the Ontario Toolkit (more on this below).

2.4 When the Committee completed its work on the new Standards document discussed above, the resulting changes needed to be incorporated into existing Toolkits.

2.5 The revised Canada Toolkit was completed first (Feb. 2009), and is in the process of being posted on the CCC website. The completed version is available at: http://www.lexum.org/ccc-ccr/neutr/cn.list.ca_en.html

2.6 Daniel: Are the Toolkits really needed? The purpose of the Standards was to provide a clear, simple, one-page document to the courts and tribunals.

2.7 General discussion: The complexity of the work was acknowledged, but it was deemed helpful to have standardization in the names.

2.8 Louise Hamel: The Ontario Courts decided to prepare an Ontario Toolkit to reduce the training requirements for court staff. It was deemed easier and more cost-effective to create and maintain a single list than to train new staff across Ontario to work out the correct names for themselves. Louise arranged for a student from the UofT Faculty of Information to undertake the project.

2.9 Denis LeMay: Perhaps Case Names could be assigned a URN (Universal Resource Name) in the same way that Neutral Citations are assigned URLs.

3. Removal of extraneous punctuation from Canadian legal citations

(Daniel Poulin)

3.1 Daniel introduced a position paper written by Frédéric Pelletier entitled "The use of dots and other punctuation marks for acronyms and abbreviations in legal citations – Food for thought (May 2009)".

3.2 Alisa (Irwin Law): Philosophically not opposed to removing punctuation from citations, but there may be added costs in the editorial process. Irwin Law does not publish caselaw. Their legal citations appear in textbooks and case indexes.

• It would be costly when preparing a new edition of an existing text to change all the citations.
• When citations are copied from other sources, if they contain punctuation it is costly to remove it.
• It would be essential that the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (McGill Guide) be revised to reflect the new Standard.

3.3 Canada Law Book (Cheryl McPherson, Michael Jones): Removing dots from citations may create new words which complicate online searching. For example, O.R. would become "OR", which is normally a non-searchable term. Also discussed was the confusion surrounding citations for decisions of the Federal Courts of Canada (F.C. and FC). However, CLB said users are saying "lose the punctuation" for online searching.

3.4 Elizabeth (Maritime Law Book): Reluctant to see this change. For legislative citations, Statutes often prescribe citation formats to be used. Changing the format would require cooperation from Legislative Counsel offices.

3.5 Denis LeMay: In favour of simplifying punctuation. To succeed, CCC needs similar strong reasons as were used for Neutral Citation implementation. Look to international standards (ISO) and to German and French precedents.

3.6 Daniel's Proposal: CCC will develop a position paper during the next year, which:

• expresses the goals of simplified punctuation
• lists things that are easy to change
• outlines the difficulties that require more study (ex.: legislation, journal abbreviations)
• position paper will be presented to Legislative Counsel and Judges for comment

Consensus: Agreed.

4. Standards for Hyperlinks

(John Davis)

The most important citation for the long term is the Hyperlink. Publishers should standardize format of Hyperlinks. CCC should address this problem. Course materials for law students and research papers need hyperlinks to link to caselaw and articles.

Difficulties identified by John:

• On WestlaweCarswell if there are several versions of a case in several law reports (each having a unique topical summary/digest), the hyperlinks for all the citations point to only 1 version of the case. It may not be the desired version.
• On CanLII, there are no hyperlinks to individual paragraphs in a case or article.
• Lack of standards for hyperlinks makes it difficult for authors to construct their own hyperlinks (to save time). Hyperlinks should be predictable.

Other comments: On LexisNexis a user can obtain a permanent hyperlink for a case. For journal literature there are services such as Link Resolver, which provide the transfer between the citation and the URL.

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Meeting adjourned at 11:50 a.m.