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About CanLII

 

The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII)  is a non-profit organization managed by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada. CanLII's goal is to make Canadian law accessible for free on the Internet. This website provides access to court judgments, tribunal decisions, statutes and regulations from all Canadian jurisdictions.

Mission

  • Free access to law
Goals:
  • Meet public interest in free and unrestricted access to legal information
  • Satisfy legal community needs with a free, comprehensive and robust legal research service

Funded by Canada’s lawyers and notaries for the benefit of all, CanLII provides free access to legal information.

10 Reasons to Use CanLII

 

Here are the top 10 reasons to use CanLII for your research:

  1. CanLII publishes case law and legislation (except for BC legislation) from across Canada, as well as administrative tribunal decisions. RSS feeds are available for each court's decisions.
  2. CanLII supports searches by name, case citation, and keywords.
  3. The search engine allows you to simply type in a string of terms or to compose a more complex Boolean query. Word variations are automatically searched. Searches can be refined easily.
  4. The Advanced Search and Database Search allow you to customize your search. For example, with a click of the mouse you can restrict your search to appellate level decisions, or to a customized combination of databases.
  5. You can rank your search results by date or relevance, or by how often cases have been cited.
  6. Search results are displayed with highlighted terms. You select which search terms you want to locate in the documents, taking you faster to the most relevant passages.
  7. Cases are hyperlinked to other cases and legislation, and a note-up feature is included. Parallel citations are shown.
  8. Cases can be printed in HTML, or in PDF exactly as they were published by the court.
  9. CanLII's flexible interface allows you to browse for legislation, search within individual Acts, search an Act and its related regulations, or search all legislation. The ability to compare versions of legislation will soon be available on CanLII.
  10. There is no subscription fee, no need to log in, and no password. CanLII is funded 10. by a portion of your practice fee, but is available to everyone as part of the Law Society's commitment to public access to the law.

(Excerpt from  The Law Society of British Columbia) 

Using CanLII

 

CANLII is Canada's leading free legal information database. Use CANLII to search for Federal and Provincial legislation, caselaw, and tribunal decisions. Coverage varies across jurisdictions.

See these helpful CANLII tutorials from the Law Society of Saskatchewan Library.

 

Reading a Case Citation