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.
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.
The judgments in those reporters are available in most cases for free via Court web - sites,
with neutral citation, and through the commercial online services.
Along
with the neutral citation, one print report must be cited if available.
I completely disagree with arbitrarily changing a citation to strip it of periods so that it looks consistent
with a neutral citation.
This explains the primacy of the neutral citation as well, since essentially all cases
with a neutral citation are available on CanLII — although this does not explain the disfavouring of the CanLII citation.
AustLII is doing just that with the Australasian Colonial Legal History Library: As cases are added to the Library, they are provided
with a neutral citation.
with neutral citations, one already know the court level, so for a citation such as, say, 2007 CSC 7 at para. 20, 2007 SCC 7 at para. 7, there's no need to put the (CSC) or (SCC) in at all.
Not exact matches
The problem
with the
neutral «
citation» is that it could refer to any number of published versions of the decision or the original judgment itself.
The
neutral citation probably was conceived
with the idea of bringing some order to the proliferating «
citation» systems in mind: OJ, QJ, SCJ, CarswellOnt, AZ, JE, Lexis, ad infinitum.
Although I would have been on board if they'd said: «just cite in a way that everyone knows what you are citing to,
with a preference for
neutral citations, and beyond that don't worry about it.»
For the view from Manitoba, here is a link to the Practice Direction from the Manitoba Court of Appeal regarding the use of
neutral citations in documents filed
with the Court.
For case law cited in the BC Court of Appeal, or if you're dealing
with federal laws, online is fine: the Court of Appeal's Practice Directive on the
Citation of Authorities from 2013 accepts electronic sources
with neutral cites; and Justice Canada made online acts and regulations official in 2009.
And one of the big issues had to do
with the vendor -
neutral citation.
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.
I worked
with the authors (who were law postgrads) on AGLC for the 1st and 2nd editions, and the aim of it was to address the newly emerging e-resources — Australia being the first place to have
neutral citations endorsed by its High Court in 1995, and because the Blue Book did not deal
with Australian materials.
This compares very favourably
with the Courts» average publication timelines, from the assignment of a
neutral citation to posting on the Court website, of one to two days.
Readers not familiar
with legal research would have a fairly good chance of finding the case (or CanLII) through Googling and sophisticated researchers will know that they can use the
neutral citation to find the case in multiple locations.
The problem
with citing to the
neutral citation only is that this gives access to electronic versions only.