Bulletin #9



        Canadian Committee for a neutral citation standard



Hello everyone,



        [1] Today's' teleconference call was chaired by Daniel

Poulin, who opened the meeting by announcing QL Systems'

very generous financial contribution of 5,000 $ to the 

Committee's work. Maria Cece was back with us, and all regulars 

were on, except for Jennifer Jordan and Edna Brewster. The 

McGill Law Journal was represented by Mr. Karlo Giannascoli.



        [2] Version 1.2 of the working draft was unanimously and 

quickly approved, after which section 4 of the working draft, 

optional elements and other specific matters, was taken up.



        [3] Proposal 4.2, on not providing information about the

hierarchical level of a tribunal, and proposal 4.3, on not

providing optional segments to specify the internal structure

of tribunals, were quickly approved, both deriving from the

already accepted principle of simply identifying a document

rather than attempting to also describe it (section 4.1 had 

previously been replaced with section 2.1.2(ii)). Section 4.4, 

on the reach of the standard and the inclusion of quasi-

judicial bodies, also met with the agreement that nothing special

should be done regarding quasi-judicial bodies, on the same

basis as the previous sections.



        [4] A lengthy discussion followed on decision qualifiers,

section 4.5. Again, since the goal is to identify rather than 

describe, it was agreed that only one qualifier should be used

to indicate that a document is a revision of an already 

published document.



        [5] On references to notes, section 4.6, it was agreed that

the letter "n" before the number of the note would indicate

that a note and not a paragraph is referred to. It was also

pointed out that notes are sometime numbered on a page basis,

footnotes numbering starting at one with each new page. Others 

schemes were exposed. It was agreed that this is an issue

concerning the Standards for the Preparation, Distribution 

and Citation of Canadian Judgements in Electronic Form, a.k.a the

Felsky Standard, that will undergo revision when the current

work on the citation standard is completed. The foreseen 

recommendation would be to use a single numbering sequence

in a decision.



        [6] Finally, section 4.7, on note-up possibilities, was

quickly disposed of, again on the principle of limiting the

standard to simply identifying decisions.



        [7] The language issue was revisited and the subcommittee

proposal reconsidered in some detail. After some discussion,

the subcommittee proposal was adopted. To quote the previous 

bulletin:



     "Basically, identifiers in officially bilingual 

      jurisdictions (federal courts and New Brunswick) should 

      also be bilingual, joining identifiers in each official 

      language by a separator. Citations of judgements by courts

      of these jurisdictions would always carry a language code. 

      In other jurisdictions, that are unilingual, the tribunal

      identifiers remain unilingual and no language code is 

      necessary if the judgement is in the official or majority 

      language of the jurisdiction."



Citations of judgements by courts of officially bilingual

jurisdictions would always carry a language code, because

even if all judgements are not initially published in both 

languages, as only the Supreme Court does, a translation of a

judgement can always be issued latter. It was also agreed that 

indication of language will be done through a suffix to the 

ordinal number. A convincing argument in favour of that option 

was that it would make the Canadian neutral citation more easily 

understood in other countries liable to adopt the ABA proposal. 

The standard text will explain in detail how the language issue 

will be dealt with.



        [8] Under Varia, it was mentioned that our citation standard

project is not on the agenda of the ACCA Conference at the end of

September.  A strategy will have to be developed in that regard.

Ruth Rintoul also pointed out that if neutral citations are to

be attributed by tribunals, they will also have to attribute 

case names. The CLIC style standard proposal was pronounced a 

good starting point for future work on that issue, when the 

decision preparation standard is opened again.



        [9] A draft of the standard proper will soon be available 

on our Web server for your review. The URL will be advertised 

through this bulletin.



        [10] The next conference call is planned for August 12, 

a Wednesday, at 13h00 Montreal time, as always. If you plan not

to be able to participate, please let me know. You can e-mail

your comments on the standard text draft at your convenience.



        [11] And as Daniel pointed out, I will soon be signing off

as secretary of the Committee, but will remain a member and thus

will be on the next conference call and beyond.



        It's been a pleasure working with you all.





        Yours truly,



        Guy Huard







-- 

Guy Huard      huard@crdp.umontreal.ca

Editeur        LexUM

               Centre de Recherche en Droit Public

               Universite de Montreal

               http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/



Tel: +1 (514) 343-7853

Fax: +1 (514) 343-7508