Legal Citation with the Canadian Open Access Legal Citation Guide (the COAL Guide)

How to Choose a Pattern

There are three possible patterns to follow when citing a case. These patterns are explained in detail in the next three sections of this guide.

To determine which of these patterns you should use, answer the following questions.

Question 1: “Does the case have a neutral citation?” (If you do not know what a neutral citation looks like, see the explanation below)

> If the answer is YES, you must follow Pattern #1: Citing a Case with a Neutral Citation

> If the answer is NO, go to Question 2.

Question 2: “Does the case have a CanLII citation?” (If you do not know what a CanLII citation looks like, see the explanation below)

> If the answer is YES, you may follow Pattern #2: Citing a Case with a CanLII Citation

> If the answer is NO, you must follow Pattern #3: Citing a Case with Other Sources

Neutral Citations

In 1999, Canadian courts began assigning neutral citations to their judgments (the start date varies depending on the court). The neutral citation is only a case identifier and does not indicate where a case can be found. It consists of three parts:

• year of decision
• abbreviation of the court
• an ordinal number

For example, Lovelace v Ontario has the neutral citation 2000 SCC 37:

• 2000 = year of the decision
• SCC = court (Supreme Court of Canada)
• 37 = ordinal number (37th case decided in 2000)

The easiest way to determine if a case has a neutral citation is to follow these steps:

1. Pull up the case on a database like Westlaw, Lexis, or CanLII and look over citations provided by that database. Depending on the database, case citation options may appear in several locations, including near/below the style of cause, in a separate field called "citation", or at the very top of the document. 
2. Determine which court handed down the decision.
3. Identify the neutral citation abbreviation for that court by looking at a resource like CanLII's Primary Law Databases page.
4. If the case you're looking at has a citation that matches the neutral citation abbreviation, then you can follow case citation Pattern #1 using that citation. 

For example, let's say you're looking at a Supreme Court of Canada decision from 2019. The citation options in your database include the following:

If we look at CanLII's Primary Law Databases page, we can see that the neutral citation for the Supreme Court of Canada is SCC. Therefore, we pick out the citation from this list that has that abbreviation: 2019 SCC 65. This is our neutral citation, and we can now proceed with citing this case according to Pattern #1. 

CanLII Citations

When the court or tribunal has not assigned a neutral citation to a decision, look for a CanLII citation. In these cases, you may follow Pattern #2: Citing a Case with a CanLII Citation. The CanLII citation is composed of the year the decision was rendered followed by "CanLII", and a sequential number.

example of a CanLII citation: 2002 CanLII 3562

Note that the CanLII citation is always posted clearly in the header of every decision published on CanLII.