Category: Featured Resource

Posts about featured legal resources, mainly as catalogued in the library collection, including our databases.

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Mikisew Cree First Nation v. Canada (Governor General in Council), 2018 SCC 40

The decision in Mikisew Cree First Nation v Canada (Governor General in Council), 2018 SCC 40, was handed down last Thursday (October 11, 2018).

The Mikisew case started in 2012, when omnibus legislation that would affect the Mikisew Cree First Nation was passed, without consultation with the First Nation.  In 2014, the Federal Court ruled that there was a duty to consult First Nations before enacting legislation.  This decision was overturned in 2016 by the Federal Court of Appeal on the basis that the Federal Court lacked jurisdiction.  The Mikisew First Nation appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court unanimously agreed that the appeal should be dismissed, as the development of legislation is not subject to judicial review.  The subject of if the Crown had a duty to consult during the legislative process resulted in a more complex response. The court handed down a judgment of 7-2 that the duty to consult was not obligatory during the legislative process.   The reasoning of three justices, represented by Justice Karatansanis, agreed that the Crown did not have a duty to consult during the legislative process but stated that the Honour of the Crown still stands, and that other protections could be created in future cases.  Four justices held that there was not a duty to consult and that the issue was closed. The two dissenting justices reasoned that the duty to consult extends to the legislative process.

The following resources look at different aspects of the judgment in more detail.

General Overview: Lawson Lundell’s Project Law blog and First Peoples Law blog provide general overviews of the judgement, including explanation of separation of powers and parliamentary sovereignty.

Political/Moral Duty: An opinion piece in the Globe and Mail by Allan Hutchinson, a research professor at Osgoode Hall Law School discussed how the duty to consult was a political and moral obligation, even if not constitutionally obligatory.

Critical of judgment : An opinion piece in Maclean’s by Pam Palmater, a Mi’kmaw citizen, lawyer and chair of Indigenous Governance at Ryerson, blog post from Olthuis Kleer Townshend LLP on lack of reconciliation, discuss how the judgement will affect section 35 of the Constitution, and how it is out of sync with previous Supreme Court precedence on the subject.

Uncertainty created and future implications: Two opinion pieces by Dwight Newman, one discusses the uncertainty created by the judgement and the other discusses what the judgement could mean in the future.

This judgment is an interesting contrast to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, an Australian document created as a result of a constitutional convention of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, that Dr. Gabrielle Appleby spoke of in her talk at UVic on October 12, 2018.  See the previous blog post for further information on the Uluru statement and Dr. Appleby’s talk.

 

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Professor Ferguson’s New Book Available

University of Victoria Law Professor Gerry Ferguson, an expert in criminal law, criminal procedure, sentencing, and global corruption, has a new book: Global Corruption : Law, Theory & Practice (3d ed) freely available on CanLII and UVic Space.

Regarding the  book’s availability on CanLII, Kim Nayyer, UVic Associate University Librarian, Law, states:

I’m pleased to see high-quality, authoritative legal scholarship in CanLII, world renowned as a reliable source of legal information. CanLII’s inclusion of the respected work, Global Corruption: Law, Theory & Practice by UVic Distinguished Professor Gerry Ferguson is an advance both for access to legal information and for the exposure and availability of university scholarship.

Find out more about the new book on The CanLII Blog and Hearsay’s previous blog post

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New Title – Global Corruption : Law, theory & practice

University of Victoria Law Professor Gerry Ferguson’s new book Global Corruption : Law, Theory & Practice (3d ed) is now openly available on UVic Space and CanLII. Published by UVic, this two volume book is a valuable resource for professors, students, lawyers and anti-corruption practitioners alike.

The book was created to support law courses on global corruption in Canada, with the potential for use in the US, UK or any other English speaking country. The book begins by establishing the nature and extent of global corruption, including reference to additional historical, social, economic and political contexts. The following chapters outline international standards and requirements for combating corruption, with the laws of the US, UK and Canada provided as examples for how these standards are met.

The book is published under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 CA license, which allows for reproduction of the book for non-commercial purposes, with credit given to the author.

A print copy of the book is in the UVic Law Library Reserve Collection, call number K2515 F47 2018. Print copies of the book are also available for purchase at the UVic bookstore.

Read more about the book on CanLII and the UVic Scholarly Communication Blog.

 

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CanLII Keeps Getting Better

CanLII has undergone many improvements in the past year, including the addition of new content and technology.

Dominion Law Reports (DLRs) that are cited in CanLII’s collection were added in the fall of 2016.  DLRs from before 1980 are available in a format CanLII refers to as “Spiffy PDFs”:  a more efficient method of making historical documents available, with comparable functionality to the HTML format used for more current case law. This is what they look like.

In February, CanLII acquired Lexum, a Canadian legal technologies firm. This partnership enabled improvements to CanLII such as adding LexBox, to save searches and set up alerts for new search results, and Solex, a new search engine which provides faster, more flexible searches. Solex is also compatible with artificial intelligence features that Lexum is exploring to further improve search results.

CanLII has expanded its holdings beyond primary law to include books, law reviews, reports and newsletters amounting to over 1000 pieces of commentary. The display of commentary relies on Qweri, another Lexum creation which converts word documents into a more usable web-friendly HTML format. The commentary section is in addition to CanLII Connects, an open source platform where members of the law community can make their commentary available to everyone.

To read more details on the changes, check out CanLII’s blog post or explore the many resources available on CanLII.

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Carswell Looseleafs now Available Online

Over 75 of the Carswell looseleaf titles available in print at the UVic Law Library are now available online through Carswell’s eBook platform ProView. Below are just a few of the titles that UVic Faculty and Students can now access online:

  • Peter Hogg, Constitutional Law of Canada, 5th ed
  • Robert G Owen, British Columbia Corporation Manual, 2nd ed
  • Kent W. Roach, Constitutional Remedies in Canada, 2nd ed
  • Roger E. Salhany, Canadian Criminal Procedure, 6th ed
  • Jack Woodward, Native Law

You can access this fully searchable database through the Library Refined Databases list under Books and Articles > eReference on Proview or directly here: eReference on ProView. 

With ProView you can:

  • Link to full-text cases in WestlawNext Canada
  • Create a PDF that you can save, print, and share
  • Search by more that one term, within the Table of Contents, or jump to specific sections of the title directly from the Table of Contents
  • Customize your display with choice of fonts, text sizes, colour scheme, and line spacing

More loose-leaf titles will be added to this database over time, so make sure to check back again!

For questions on how to use this resource please contact us at lawref@uvic.ca or visit us at the Research Help Desk.

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New Resource: Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law

Researchers at UVic now have access to a new online resource licenced by the UVic Libraries, the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law located on the same platform as Oxford Constitutions of the World.

The Encyclopedia, launched by Oxford University Press this past spring, contains a growing number of peer-reviewed analytical articles on a variety constitutional law topics in a comparative context. Currently containing over 90 in-depth articles, the Encyclopedia will contain between 500-600 articles once completed. The Encyclopedia is full text searchable and can also be browsed by topic, subject or jurisdiction.

The Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law is just one of the many resources on comparative constitutional law available at the UVic Law Library. Below  you will find a small sample of the many resources on comparative constitutional law.

Happy researching!

Related resources:

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Book series: Terrorism: Commentary on Security Documents (Oxford University Press)

Terrorism: Commentary on Security Documents is a series that provides primary source documents and expert commentary on various topics relating to the worldwide effort to combat terrorism, as well as efforts by the United States and other nations to protect their national security interests. Source: Oxford University Press website .

The Law Library has just received the latest two volumes in this series, vol. 145,  The North Korean Threat and vol. 146, Russia’s Resurgence.

The series began publication  in  1979 (original publisher Oceana) with  up to three volumes published annually.   Although many documents included might be available from US government websites,   the value of titles in this series lies with the topical compilation of the documents including some non-US sources ,  along with the expert commentary provided by the editors of each volume.  The current general editor of the series is Doglas C. Lovelace Jr. , Director of the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College.   The series was originally titled Terrorism: Documents of International and Local Control.

According to the Oxford University Press website, the latest volume, 146,  “includes Congressional Research Service reports on security issues concerning the United States, Ukraine, and the Russian Federation, as well as an English-language version of the Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation made available to the public, NATO’s Framework for Future Alliance Operations, and recent studies on Russia’s hybrid warfare from the NATO Defense College and the Joint Special Operations University Press .”

The Law Library holds the complete set from volume 1, shelved  at call number HV6421 T464.  For a listing of the title of each volume see the Library catalogue record .  The titles can be borrowed.  A multi-volume index is part of the series.  The index includes five sections: Subject Index, Title, Index, Name Index, Index by Year, and Subject by Year.

Related reference work:

The Sage Encyclopedia of Terrorism [electronic resource]  (2011, 2nd ed.) ed.

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Introducing LawArXiv

On May 8th, Cornell Law Library launched LawArXiv, a repository for legal scholarship. LawArXiv is free and open source for the benefit of the legal community. The repository is run on the Open Science Framework (OSF), a web application of the non-profit technology start-up Center for Open Science (COS). To develop LawArXiv, Cornell Law Library partnered with the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA), the Mid-American Law Library Consortium (MALLCO), and NELLCO Law Library Consortium Inc. The UVic Law Library is a member of NELLCO, and so LawArXiv represents one of the positive and tangible outcomes of our membership fees.

This free, open access repository is owned and will be maintained by the legal scholarship community and law librarians of Cornell. Legal scholars can contribute preprints or post-prints where the author has the copyright of their published research. As a community-owned repository, LawArXiv can be seen as an instrument for protecting the integrity of the legal scholarly community and preventing legal research from being overwhelmed by the profit motivations that govern other repositories subject to corporate interests. As expressed by Tracy Thompson, Executive Director of NELLCO: “Taking access to scholarship out of the commercial marketplace, through a non-profit collaboration like LawArXiv, just makes good sense. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but having choices levels the playing field for scholars and researchers alike.”

Visit LawArXiv, or check their twitter feed listing new papers that have been uploaded to the site.

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#Research4Refugees: Resources from your UVic librarians

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

  • A brief overview of US legal research for Canadian legal researchers, with links to key sources:

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

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Welcome 2016-2017 students

To new UVic Law students, welcome, and to returning students, welcome back!

We are excited to work with you to facilitate your learning and research in 2016-2017.

To new upper year students, Law Librarians Caron Rollins and Alexander Burdett and Staff Senior Supervisor Marisa Lousier welcome you to a tour of and orientation to library services and resources at 12:30 pm.

And all first year students, Caron, Alex, and Marisa look forward to showing you the library and our resources and services during your allotted block from 1:00 to 3:00 pm.

Here are the law library’s fall term regular hours:

Monday – Thursday: 8:00 AM – 10:00 PM
Friday: 8:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Saturday – Sunday: 10:00 AM – 5:30 PM

Our hours change at exams and between terms. Full details are available here. Research help hours will be posted shortly—look for signs at the research help desk and loan desk, and watch for a post here.

For full details on Law’s orientation for new students, visit UVic Law’s orientation for new students page.