Case in Point: Research examples from the Law Library

Where can I access the full text of a Canadian case?

Welcome to Case in Point, our legal research series based on real requests received at Law Library Victoria. This question was submitted by a lawyer who had a citation for a Canadian case.

They knew it was Canadian because they had found the case in a citator, which listed the court as the Court of Appeal (Ontario).

A good head start, but they didn’t have access to the full text of the case. Here is the case citation:

R v Armstrong (2003) 176 OAC 319 (CA)

Citations can seem incomprehensible if you are unfamiliar with them, and cases from international jurisdictions even more so. We need to break the citation down to find it.

For this citation we can ignore the ‘(CA)’ - this is from the citator the requestor used, and just indicates that it is Canadian, but it’s not actually part of the citation.

There are two tools we can use to try to figure it out: an international case citator, and an abbreviation index.

We ran the citation through free citator LawCite. It’s the citator used on all the ‘LII’ websites – AustLII, NZLII, CanLII, etc. These are part of the Free Access to Law Movement.

There were no results on LawCite. Next, we check the report’s abbreviation ‘OAC’ using the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations, an essential and free legal research tool.

This confirmed the case was from the law report series Ontario Appeal Cases.

So now we know the name of the law report, and that it is not freely available online.

Where in the world are the Ontario Appeal Cases

Next we check the Law Library’s catalogue to see if it is in our print or digital collections. Although we have a Canadian law collection, we do not have this particular law report.

At this point we can offer the requestor two options:? they can purchase it through the publisher, which a Google search tells us is Lexis Nexis, or accept an alternative reported version.

Parallel citations

Often a case is reported in more than one publication. To find out where else it has been reported, we need to run it through a case citator.

We have already tried a free citator, so now we need to try a subscription citator.

For a Canadian case our first stop is Westlaw Canada, which is freely available for anyone to access onsite at the Supreme Court Library.

PRO TIP: Search on the citation’s numbers and letters first, eg, ‘(2003) 176 OAC 319’, leaving out the party names. This will usually display a single result, filtering out irrelevant results such as other judgments.

Westlaw Canada had the case on file, with all its glorious parallel citations. Of course, none of these citations were familiar, so we repeat the process:

1. Check the abbreviation in Cardiff.
2. Search the Library catalogue to see if the title is in the collection.

We were able to offer the requestor the Canadian Criminal Cases (CCC) as an alternative law report, which they accepted. We only had it in print, so they came into the Library and scanned it.

And that’s how we found a tricky Canadian case!