As has worked in the past,
when the neutral citation system for Canadian courts was created and adopted, and equally a uniform naming convention for Canadian judgments, I would suggest the work be entrusted to a core working group supported by an advisory board representative of all the affected communities: the Courts (and the Canadian Judicial Council), the law publishers both print and digital (especially CanLII and Lexum), legal writing and research faculty, law librarians and practising lawyers from both our French and English legal communities.
The best part of this guide is that it includes a jurisdiction table that shows dates
when neutral citation was implemented.
I'm all for the use of the neutral citation, exclusively,
when a neutral citation is available.
Not exact matches
You MUST include a
Neutral Citation at least as a parallel citation when submitting something to the
Citation at least as a parallel
citation when submitting something to the
citation when submitting something to the courts.
4.3
Citation to Case law [61] When citing a case, include its neutral citation, if it
Citation to Case law [61]
When citing a case, include its
neutral citation, if it
citation, if it has one.
For a case law database, «comprehensive» means that within our continuous coverage (which is clearly stated) we have all the judgments which can be identified by one of these four approaches: — The court website (
when applicable); — The
neutral citation (some courts use a strict sequence of numbers); — The
citations found in the Reflex set of 33 report series; — The
citations found in CanLII documents.
However, I agree that using the
neutral citation (
when available) generally solves this problem.
There is no reason not to use a
neutral citation to cite a case
when such
citation is available.
When a judgment has been published in printed reporter and / or has a
neutral citation, write the
neutral citation or the printed reporter, then write in parentheses available on, followed by the name of the electronic service.
Many courts assign a
neutral citation when a decision has been rendered.
In the case of the
neutral citation, the argument has been persuasively made that the Guide was right to look to the future
when it advocated the use of the
neutral citation well before its time.
Personally I see that
neutral citations have great potential if and
when they come to be accepted by the legal profession as the primary means of identifying cases.
When accessing such a case online, one need only provide the
neutral citation».
The Court asks parties preparing factums of submissions to limit parallel
citations to two, beginning with the
neutral citation when available (s. 3) and to omit useless terms or information in certain circumstances (ss.
When I led the design of the Canadian
Neutral Citation scheme in the nineties, I made certain that no dots or brackets, square or round, would encumber the new citing device.
This is why we are advocating that the
neutral citation be always used
when citing a decision.
These databases seem to be «puntuation
neutral»
when searching
citations as phrases.