This app generates legal citations. Although the app's initial focus will be on getting McGill-correct citations, the end goal will be to code rules that will comply with all major Canadian courts and jurisdictions.
When I started law school, a developer started a project that took a website URL — specifically, a link to a reported case on CanLII — and converted it to a McGill-correct citation. Every first year law student has better things to worry about than citations, and I was no exception. More than once, I felt that this website was a lifesaver, as it allowed me to focus on substantive, complex concerns while an algorithm or two made the citation process virtually automatic.
Unfortunately, the web app I used shut down just a few months before I finished law school. While I'd had plenty of time to figure out how to do correct citations, and very often with the website's help, the app's disappearance left an obvious gap in the workflow I'd become accustomed to. To my knowledge, nothing has replaced it. At least, nothing remotely affordable. This app aims to fill that gap.
Legal work lives and dies around documents. Even for so-called "trial lawyers" like myself who spend most of their work day in court, an inordinate amount of time is spent drafting documents for clients, judges, and other lawyers. Where this drafting includes references to other works, legal citations come into play. In a common law system like Canada's, where the concept of precedent is key, most written legal work involves frequent references to previous binding decisions and other authoritative texts.
Not every law school professor, legal office, or senior/supervising partner will care about correct citations. But enough of them will and do to make an app like this worthwhile. Correctly citing various sources in legal documents can be tricky, tedious, and incredibly time consuming. Having this process automated while I was in law school was a lifesaver, and although I don't rely on citations as much as I used to, having this process automated once again will greatly improve my workflow. I expect that there are many others in my situation who would feel similarly.
Case law on CanLII.
The "McGill Guide" is the go-to source for most legal citations in Canada. This book contains both rules for citations and abbreviations for myriad journals, courts, and case reporters. Where provincial rules don't outline a rule or a correct citation, the forms and rules that the McGill Guide outlines are usually the default. Therefore, it is arguably the app's most critical data component.
CanLII is a free and accessible database of Canadian legal decisions, statutes, and journal articles. It is non-profit and funded by Canadian Law Societies. It is my leading source for case law and statutes in practice, and will very likely be the leading source for this material in this project.
Where courts have their own expectations about how to cite documents, they will usually provide a citation guideline. This tends to either take form as an official document or as a notice to the profession.
Proprietary sources are unlikely to be a good source of data, despite being widely available to lawyers and law students. Companies like Thompson Reuters and LexisNexis offer their own comparable (albeit incredibly expensive) services and aren't likely to play nice. HeinOnline is much smaller but still appears to be a closed ecosystem.
Generally, legal citations contain the following components:
The McGill Guide 9e also includes:
Example:
The state may be authorized to search private property without a warrant if the law authorizes the search, the authorizing law is reasonable, and the search itself was conducted reasonably (see R v Jones, 2017 SCC 60 at para 57, [2017] 2 SCR 696 [Jones]).
Using the form {style_of_cause}, {main_citation} at {pinpoint}, {parallel citation}, the above citation can be broken down into those components as follows: