American case law is sometimes quite difficult to track down, as most of the time our basic Canadian database subscriptions do not cover other jurisdictions. (That’s why we added British case law database JustisOne to our subscriptions; check out our introductory post if you haven’t had the chance yet!)

So where can we find free access to American Case Law?

1. Google Scholar is always the first place we look. With a clean interface and a large collection of cases from state and federal courts, it’s a fantastic place to start. From the main search screen, select “Case Law” (or articles/patents if you are looking for those), and enter your search terms. Your results page should look quite familiar to you; you can click through to open a case. Note that you can also click on the “How Cited” link at the top to see any articles or cases that refer to it. Often times even if Google Scholar does not have the case you are looking for, it will still contain a reference to the case as well as alternative citations that you can try elsewhere.

2. Findlaw houses a lot of case law as well, as well as commentary and links to the state and district courts. To search for case law, you can enter a party’s name in the “Search for a Case” box, or alternatively, click on “Advanced Search” to enter in any other information you know. (This is where docket numbers can come in handy!) Results will bring you to a summary page, where you can click on the “Read” button to be linked to the full decision, although sometimes this will be behind a paywall.

3. Justia also offers free access to online American case law, as it brings together decisions from the Federal Courts and many of the district courts websites as well. You can search using the bar at the top right, or browse through the different courts below.

4. Casetext is the CanLIIConnects of the United States, as it features case law and added commentary by members of the legal community.

5. If you happen to know at what court the decision was made, you can often head directly to the State or District Court website to browse a database of their own decisions. Often times these are also included in the databases mentioned above.

6. Let us know! We have access to other libraries and their collections as well, so if we can help track down the case(s) you’re looking for, send us an email!

This week we’d like to highlight the “Forms” section on Quicklaw. If you have a Quicklaw subscription in your office, take a look and see if you have these in your subscription. We have them in the library through our LibraryCo Quicklaw subscription, so you can always find them here.

The quickest way to access these forms and precedents is through the Forms tab. You can see in this image where it is located from the Quicklaw homescreen.

Here’s what you need to know about these forms:

• They are available with these different practice areas in mind
  • Banking and Finance
  • Commercial Tenancies
  • Commercial Transactions
  • Corporations
  • Debtor/Creditor
  • Employment
  • Information Technology
  • Intellectual Property
  • Land Development
  • Licensing
  • Municipal Law
  • Gold’s Criminal Precedents
  • Sale and Operation of a Business
  • Sale, Distribution, and Transport of Goods
  • Solicitors Forms
  • Wills and Estates
• You can download them as Word documents (which means you can modify them without having to re-type)
• There are also some handy checklists available in each section too

If you don’t have an O’Brien’s subscription in your office or you want to try out another precedents collection, we definitely suggest looking at the collection in Quicklaw. If you need any assistance with this product, as always, let us know!

If you need to discern the intent behind a particular piece of legislation, there’s (arguably) no better place than from the discussion of those who brought it into being. Fortunately, the record of the debates of parliament, the Hansard Debates, are becoming increasingly available online.

Provincial (Ontario)

Provincial Hansard records are available from the Legislative Assembly’s website, with scattered coverage back to 1979. PDF files of the most recent parliamentary debates are also available on the Legislative Assembly’s site in addition to the plain text. If you know the date on which a certain bill was discussed, you can simply browse to that date from the link above.

Most of the time, however, you will probably not know the exact date that the bill was discussed. In this case, you can browse to the Bill itself by clicking on Bills and Lawmaking -> Past & Present, and then select the parliamentary year from the dropdown menu. Once you have located the Bill, you can click on the “Debates” tab, as seen in the example below.

This will bring up a list of the dates that the Bill was discussed in parliament, and by clicking on the blue dates, will link you directly to the Hansard records. If a link is not available online, it will at least tell you the date, which you can then use to look it up in the print version at a library.

The majority of commentary occurs during the second reading of a bill. If it is deferred to a committee, the committee reports will also be linked from this screen.

You can also search the Hansard debates here, although your mileage may vary using this search tool.

We don’t hold the print copies of the Hansard here at the CCLA Library, but they are available from the University of Ottawa Law Library and the Supreme Court Library. As always, if you have difficulty finding what you need you can contact us at library@ccla-abcc.ca and we will do our best to point you in the right direction!