Canadian Legal Research Manual

Historic publishing practices continue to influence how we access case law. This is in large part due to the evolution of case citation.

Understanding this context is crucial for a common legal research task—tracking down a known case from an existing citation. It also helps to understand the parts of a case, which also originate from historical publishing practices. 

In the past, cases were only made available through print publications called reporters. These included:

• Official reporters (e.g. the Supreme Court Reports)
• Regional reporters (e.g. the Ontario Reports), and
• Subject reporters (e.g. the Administrative Law Reports).

Only a small percentage of cases were published (reported) and many went unreported. Each case could appear in multiple reporters and therefore have several different citations. 

Today, the distinction between reported and unreported cases is less important because online databases typically include both. In the rare occasion that an unreported case is not available in a database, you can request it from the court.

We also now have neutral citations, which since around 2000 (depending on the court) have been assigned by courts to their judgments to identify a case without indicating where it can be found.

However, reporter citations are still important. Cases often have multiple, parallel citations and older cases must still be referenced using reporter citations.

The following is an example from Westlaw showing a list of parallel citations. Each citation is separated by a comma. 

A legal decision typically includes the following components. 

►See the Anatomy of a Case: Examples box on this page for a visual depiction of these elements.