Case Law

Research of Case Law: Structure of the court system

As in the United States, Canada has two parallel systems. In addition to the National Federal Court system, each province and territory has its own court system. (Canada also has a military court system and a special tax court described more fully here.) The Federal system consists of three levels:

• the Federal Court (trial level);
• the Federal Court of Appeals and
• the Supreme Court of Canada.

In the provincial system, each province has three levels of courts. Each province has a provincial (or territorial) court, followed by a superior court and then by a provincial court of appeal. The Canadian Supreme Court constitutes a fourth layer, because it is also the court of last resort for provincial cases. While the provincial and territorial superior courts can hear all matters except those which are specifically excluded by statute, the Federal Court may only hear matters that are precisely mentioned by federal statute.

For more detailed information regarding the Canadian court system, its organization and jurisdictional details, including a diagram of the court’s hierarchy, click here. For information regarding which court hears appeals of other lower courts, click here. Additionally, the Bora Laskin Law Library at the University of Toronto has prepared a legal research guide that describes the Canadian judicial system thoroughly.

Locating decisions of the federal and provincial courts in Canada

Decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada are published in print within the Supreme Court Reports (KE 140 .A23) and the Dominion Law Reports (KE 132 .A23). Online access is also available to the decisions of the Supreme Court and to the federal courts.

For provincial and territorial case law decisions, there is a provincial or territorial reporter for each province. Click here for a table detailing where these reporters can be found in print and online. Additionally, some regional reporters report cases from multiple provinces, such as the Western Weekly Reports (KE 156 .W47). The law school library also has access to its predecessor, Western Law Reporter for researchers looking for earlier decisions.

Many of the provincial and territorial courts have selected decisions available on their web sites, with varying degrees of coverage. (A review of these web site shows that their coverage starts with the late 1990s.) Some do not contain any of their decisions but provide other useful information. For information on citing Canadian decisions, click here.

Decisions of administrative tribunals may be found in print and online. In print, they are published within the Administrative Law Reports (KE 5015.A45). Availability is through the former ADMINLR-RPTS database on Westlaw.

Locating Canadian case law when you don’t have a citation

If you don’t have a citation, the Canadian Abridgement allows you to identify cases by looking up keywords used in the decision. Additionally, numerous online sources, such as the Canadian Legal Information Institute, provide key word searching in either English or French, and pertaining to particular jurisdictions or within many jurisdictions at once.

In addition to keyword searches in online databases and web sites and the Canadian Abridgement, case law decisions are available in other resources such as legal encyclopedias and reporter indices, such as the Master Key Word Index. A helpful guide prepared by the Bora Laskin Law Library, at the University of Toronto provides more information on case law research.

Making sure your case is still good law

Once you have found the case law you are looking for, you’ll need to make sure that it is still good law, known in Canada as “noting up” a decision. One resource to use to “note up” your case decision is the Canadian Case Citations: References jurisprudentielles canadiennes. While some law libraries have access to this resource only in its print format, however, it may be available at other institutions in a CD format or on e Carswell.

(For those researchers who are familiar with US law, comparable tools in the United States are Key Cite on Westlaw and Shepard’s on Lexis.) For more information on how to note up a case decision, review the helpful guide on this subject prepared by the Bora Laskin Law Library, at the University of Toronto.

Note: We linked the resources to archive.org in an effort to decrease the number of broken links cited.

Canadian Case Law Online

The advantage of electronic versions of legislation, whether on the Internet, CD-ROM or online databases, is that the text of the legislation is much more up to date as the amendments are incorporated directly into the text of the original act or regulation as soon as they are available. This minimizes the need to manually update print versions through various annual volumes.

Ordinarily, when citing legislation in court, reference must be made to and photocopies provided of the official Queen’s Printer version (as opposed to a commercial version of the act published by Carswell, CCH Canada, Canada Law Book or Butterworths Canada).

The judgments from various federal and provincial courts and jurisdictions are now available on the Internet. You can also access court decisions available on the Internet through the University of Montreal’s web site and through CanLII, a web site maintained by the federation of law societies of Canada.

Quicklaw, the online commercial service, now part of Lexis, provided the most comprehensive coverage of court decisions from all jurisdictions across Canada. It’s case law databases are organized by jurisdiction such as the Ontario Reports Plus database (ORP) that includes all reported and unreported cases from Ontario; by topic such as the Torts Law (TORT) database, and by format (such as full-text versus the summary databases). Other online providers of Canadian case law include eCarswell and Westlaw.

Law is our Passion

This entry about Case Law has been published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY 3.0) licence, which permits unrestricted use and reproduction, provided the author or authors of the Case Law entry and the Encyclopedia of Law are in each case credited as the source of the Case Law entry. Please note this CC BY licence applies to some textual content of Case Law, and that some images and other textual or non-textual elements may be covered by special copyright arrangements. For guidance on citing Case Law (giving attribution as required by the CC BY licence), please see below our recommendation of "Cite this Entry".

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This entry was last updated: April 24, 2016