News from the law library
Librarians will be available at the Research Help Desk to offer research and citation help from 11:30 am – 1:30 pm today (February 20) and tomorrow (February 21).
Our regular Research Help Desk hours will resume on Wednesday:
11:30 am – 1:30 pm
3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
On January 26, 2017 the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) announced in a news release the creation of an archive of the “content of most online sources cited by the Court between 1998 and 2016.” The archive is located in the Judgment section of the SCC website: Internet Sources Cited in SCC Judgments 1998 – 2016
The SCC has responded to ongoing issues with citation of online sources, namely “link rot” where a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) does not serve up any content, and “reference rot” where the link works but the information has changed (see Zittrain, below at p 177) . The SCC now captures and archives online sources cited in the “Authors Cited” section of judgments and assigns an “archived version” URL thus ensuring that future researchers will be able to read what the Court cited.
The SCC’s approach is not new, since 2008 the US Ninth Circuit has archived websites it cites (see Liebler, below at p. 301). Readers who use the Government of Canada website may recall seeing “archived on the web” messages on web pages, indicating these webpages have been captured and archived online. Often these archived sources are captured in the Government of Canada’s’ web archive. It is most often that online free sources develop link rot. Databases like Lexis Nexis and Westlaw assign their own persistent identifiers (see Lyons below at p. 685).
The assignment of an “archived version” link grows from the establishment of persistent URLs (PURLs). Use of PURLs provides for continuity of references to network resources that may migrate. PURLs have been in use since 1995. Early examples of permanent URLs are found in the catalogues and databases of government information. The United States Government Printing Office uses PURLs in US GPO FDSYS. Persistent URLs were designed to get around the problem of “link rot”, i.e. no content, which occurs when a website and it folders are moved to entirely different locations and servers (see Liebler & Liebert below at p. 305).
Current examples of moving to different servers? Government website reorganizations after elections. President Obama’s White House webpages have been archived at: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ . The Government of Canada is currently redesigning all of its websites. Fortunately, the government publications likely to be cited in a judgment or scholarly publication will have a PURL. You just have to use the right PURL locator,for example, the Government of Canada Publications catalogue, the Legislative Library of British Columbia Catalogue, the United States Government Printing Office catalogue, and now the SCC Internet Sources.
Another example of capturing and archiving cited sources is Perma.cc, developed by the Harvard Law Library. Like the SCC archive, Perma.cc captures what an author sees at moment of citation (Zittrain, below at p. 191). Authors provide a link to Perma; Perma then archives the full text associated with the URL. Perma then returns a new URL, a Perma URL, to the author for use instead of original URL, thus avoiding “link rot”. Perma goes one step further; ensuring through LOCKSS technology permanent preservation of the captured content. Perma is being used by law reviews in Canada and the United States, include UVic’s own Appeal: Journal of Law Review and Reform.
And we mustn’t overlook the Internet Archive’s WayBack machine. If no one institution has take the time to create a web archive or PURL, you may luck out by using the WayBack Machine at https://archive.org/web/
For more information on Perma, link rot, and permanent URLs see:
Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert, & Lawrence Lessig, “Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations” (2014) 127 Harv. L. Ref. F. 176, online: <http://harvardlawreview.org/2014/03/perma-scoping-and-addressing-the-problem-of-link-and-reference-rot-in-legal-citations/>. Also published in (2014) 14 Legal information Management.
Raizel Liebler & June Liebert, “Something Rotten in the State of Legal Citation: the Life Span of a United States Supreme Court Citation Containing an Internet Link (1996-2010)”, (2012) 15 Yale J.L. & Tech. 273, online: <http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/yjolt15&collection=journals&id=273>
Susan Lyone, “Persistent identification of electronic Documents and the Future of Footnotes”, (2005) 97 Law. Libr.J. 681, online: <http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/llj97&collection=journals&id=679>
PURL <http://www.oclc.org/research/themes/data-science/purl.html>
Permca.cc <https://perma.cc/>
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice issued its decision this morning (February 14, 2017) in the Ontario Sixties Scoop class action.
The court held that the Federal Crown owed and breached a “common law duty of care to take reasonable steps to prevent on-reserve Indian children in Ontario, who had been placed in the care of non-aboriginal foster or adoptive parents, from losing their aboriginal identity” (Brown v Canada, 2017 ONSC 251, at para 85).
The full court decision is available on The Globe and Mail website and will be available on CanLII later this week.
An archived stream of the ceremonial sharing of the decision at the Native Child and Family Services of Toronto with the representative plaintiff Chief Marcia Martel is available for viewing here.
On February 1, 2017 the Federal Government announced that it would seek to negotiate a national settlement to the “Sixties Scoop litigation’. The full press release can be found on the Government of Canada’s website.
For more background information on the Sixties Scoop, below are a few items in UVic Libraries’ collection:
Please note that the Law Library will be closed next Monday, February 13 (Family Day). Full details of our hours of operation are available here.
While the research help desk will be closed during reading week – research and citation help will remain available during reading week.
Students, you’re encouraged to email or phone the usual research help contacts. The librarians receive email and phone messages at those contacts and will respond as quickly as possible, Monday through Friday. You may also make an appointment with a librarian for research help via email or the staff at the library loan desk.
Our regular Research Help Desk hours will resume on Monday, February 20.
The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit is set to hear oral arguments at 3:00 pm PST on whether the federal district court’s temporary nationwide injunction barring the enforcement of President Trump’s executive order on immigration should remain in place.
Oral arguments will be live streamed on the US Court of Appeals’ website at 3:00 pm PST. Students and faculty interested in listening to oral arguments can listen here. If anyone is unable to listen this afternoon, the hearing will also be archived and made available by 12:00 pm PST on Wednesday, February 8. The archived hearing will be posted to the court’s YouTube channel here.
The court has also made available the parties’ written briefs and all amicus curiae briefs. All briefs are available on the court’s website.
Kudos for your great work in #research4refugees, UVic Law students!
In the interests of expediency, we’re posting here the research resources you need to get started. Later, we can formalize into an more structured research guide. You will also find us at the law school or in the library on Saturday to offer a guiding hand.
And watch this space—It is growing by the minute!
New! (added 4:20 pm, Friday Feb 3)
We’ve added a brief list of relevant secondary sources available in the law library, a growing list at the bottom of this post.
Other sources (added 2:25 pm, Friday Feb 3)
And of course if you haven’t taken LAW 323 or LAW 342, don’t forget to orient yourself with some key secondary sources:
US resources
US legal research 24 Feb 2016 CC ppt
Other commentary:
Bordering on Failure : Canada-U.S. Border Policy and the Politics of Refugee Exclusion , Harvard Immigration and Refugee Law Clinical Program, 2013.
Audrey Macklin, Disappearing Refugees: Reflections on the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement, (2004-2005) 36 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 365 The article provides background on the agreement such as below:
HANDS ACROSS THE BORDER:Working Together at our Shared Border and Abroad to Ensure Safety, Security and Efficiency. Report of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, December 2002
Government Response to the Report of the Standing Committee
on Citizenship and Immigration Safe Third Country Regulations, May 2003
(As we’re pulling this together pretty quickly, we might have typos or link errors in some of the content above. If you spot any, please inform us and we’ll fix asap.)
EU Asylum Policies [electronic resource] : the Power of Strong Regulating States / Natascha Zaun Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) ebook
Added July 2017