In the meantime, until CanLII is able to convince the courts to
include neutral citations, it seems to me that the algorithm should at least be modified so that it picks up valid, major, SCC commercial citations such as the DLR.
You MUST
include a Neutral Citation at least as a parallel citation when submitting something to the courts.
4.3 Citation to Case law [61] When citing a case,
include its neutral citation, if it has one.
however, in the grand scheme of things, court decisions which do not
include a neutral citation will tend to become less available and thus less cited.
Not exact matches
A Standardized Data / Markup Model to Support
Neutral Citation of Court Cases, Legislation, and Regulations
includes references from 1995 up to and
including mid-January 2014.
CLEBC style is to use the
neutral citation in the text, but
include all parallel cites in the table of cases.
The best part of this guide is that it
includes a jurisdiction table that shows dates when
neutral citation was implemented.
It seems to me that CanLII ought to be able to entail good alternative
citations into its count of cases that cite X,
including Quicklaw
citations; and I suspect that with a bit of work it should be able to catch the messed up
neutral citations, perhaps by running a double - check against the case names.
In my view, there is no need to
include a full Quicklaw or Westlaw Canada
citation for a case that has a
neutral citation or that has been reported.
The
Neutral Citation Standard for Case Law was developed in 1998 by the Canadian
Citation Committee, an informal group that brought together various specialists in legal information from the judiciary, academia and the publishing industry,
including slawers Martin Felsky and Daniel Poulin.
Divergent views are expressed regarding the need to
include a full Quicklaw or Westlaw Canada
citation in addition to citing to a print reporter or
neutral citation, and the need to refer at all to the electronic version if a print reporter is cited.
This does not
include any restriction on the use of
neutral citations used by PacLII, whether or not developed by PacLII.
I am a strong believer that citing a case with a
neutral citation to only the
neutral citation is sufficient, with there being no need to
include parallel
citations.
Neutral citations, and parallel
citations within the scope of RefLex, are
included to allow proper
citation to reported cases.