Legal Research

CanLII?s New Site for Legislation

By Simon Fodden

CanLII always seems to release the good news late on Friday… Maybe it’s that as the weekend approaches the pressure to finish the project gets it done just in time. Maybe it’s some impulse to drop the bomb and run.

This time it’s their new database for legislation, over on their beta site, and the really good news is that you can do point in time searching and comparisons of different versions. This function is currently available only for federal, Quebec, Ontario and Saskatchewan legislation, but as the bugs get removed from the new system, other jurisdictions will be migrated to it.

A quick comparison of the current and immediately prior versions of the Ontario Family Law Act, for example, shows you the statute in two columns, older on the left, newer on the right, with deleted portions highlighted in red and added portions highlighted in green. All in all, very handy indeed.

Other improvements available in the beta version are weekly updates, RSS feeds, and better noteup.

You can (and should) read the announcement, and as well the explanatory page for the new functionality.

Once again, congratulations are due to CanLII. You guys just keep getting better and better.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 31, 2009 (boomark / email).