Development of a case law neutral citation standard for Canada


Canadian Citation Committee Working draft

This version: 1.2
            http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/citation/draft3app.html
Previous version: 1.1
            http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/citation/draft2app.html
Editors:
            Guy Huard (CRDP) <huard@crdp.umontreal.ca>
            Daniel Poulin (CRDP) <poulind@droit.umontreal.ca>

Date: 10 July 1998


Status of this document


This document represents the discussion of the Committee as of its June 17 meeting and has been approved on the July 9 meeting. It supersedes version 1.1 approved by the Committee on June 17, 1998

________________________________________________________________________

[Section 2 has been revised to reflect work done on separators and by the sub-committee on treatment of language. In section 3, proposals have been added and section revised to reflect the Committee's discussion on June 17. Modifications to section 4 have also been made when it has been affected by discussions on previous sections.]

Introduction

This document lays out a set of problems related to the development of a new standard for the citation of judicial decisions in Canada. The Canadian Citation Committee (Canadian Ad hoc Committee for the development of a neutral citation standard) was created in Montreal on 11 August 19971. Its first steps aimed to regroup parties and specialists able to participate in its work2. This document offers a first synthesis of questions to be solved for such a standard to come about; it will of course evolve as our grasp of the different questions it deals with grows.

The proposed standard will include mandatory and optional elements, the description of the latter identifying recommended practices. Thus, no constraints on the size of elements will generally be imposed, although the success of the proposed standard will certainly derive from the briefness and simplicity of its elements. The final proposal should clearly distinguish mandatory elements from those having the status of recommended practices.

In this first version, questions, problems and, when advisable, some interesting solutions are identified. The goal of this standardisation effort is first spelled out. Then, an architecture of the sought reference model is presented and some currently considered avenues are outlined. Thirdly, the required elements of information, the kernel of the reference model, are described and discussed. After that, other elements that can be added to this kernel and associated questions are examined in turn. Finally, as this is not the first time a similar standard is considered, past efforts are reviewed.

 

1 Goals of the citation standard

The citation to a judgement must be precise and unequivocal : it must uniquely designate the very decision mentioned. The citation will be attributed by the tribunal releasing the judgement. It will be independent of various subsequent publications, either by the tribunal itself or a law publisher. As a result, it will also be independent of the publishing media, paper or electronic. We believe our goal of developing a citation standard means we must produce a framework enabling the application of such a standard. Thus, not only must the citation itself be precise, but the method of its preparation must also be simple and rigorous. In fact, if a citation is to designate a judicial decision, it is also to be hoped a single correct citation can be written for that decision using the standard. By the same token, the goal of simplicity commands thrifty use of separators inside the citation.

1.1 On the descriptive dimension of the standard

This project doesn’t aim to develop a perfectly descriptive standard. Thus, even if it would be feasible to develop a citation standard providing numerous pieces of information on a decision, such as, for example, the hierarchical level of a tribunal, the citation should be restricted to identifying documents rather than attempting to describe them. The considered standard should be limited to elements essential to a compact and simple designation mode.

1.2 On the designation of sources

Traditional citation modes indicate where a document can be found, one of its available sources. This citation proposal differs from them in its stressing the sole identification of the document. We must choose between the two : it is not possible to reconcile the designation of a specific publication with the production of a publication-neutral citation.

1.3 On the development of the standard and compliance with jurisdictions

Canadian realities and simple common sense lead to producing a standard that may on the one hand continue to reflect the evolution of the Canadian judicial system and, on the other hand, be moulded by those directly involved in the management of this system in Canada’s various jurisdictions. The Committee should intend in this regard to be inspired by practices developed within the framework of the Internet for the attribution of domain names. A way in which tribunal identifiers would be attributed in a hierarchical fashion must be thought through. Quebec or Alberta judicial authorities could thus be in a position to choose designators for their tribunals based on simple and shared rules of construction of identifiers.

1.4 On IT friendliness

The standard must easily yield itself to the unavoidable computer processing of judicial documents. For this, it must be possible to easily derive convenient identifiers for electronic addressing from citations conforming to the standard. This objective brings few additional constraints besides the avoidance of French diacritic signs, as we will see further in the section on the character set used for elements.

1.5 Goal proposal

The developed citation mode must afford precise reference in a simple and standardised way to any Canadian judicial decision. The envisioned citation standard should yield a single possible citation for each specific document. The citation should be attributed by the tribunal itself and should be independent of any publishing medium. Finally, an extensible architecture of the standard enabling it to adapt to new situations will be sought, as well as decentralisation among jurisdictions of the attribution of identifiers to various tribunals.

Proposal 1.1: It is proposed that the citation be unique, medium-independent and simply but precisely identify decisions rather than attempt to describe them.

Proposal 1.2: It is proposed that tribunal designation based on the standard be attributed by judicial authorities.

Proposal 1.3: It is proposed that citations be attributed to decisions by the tribunals themselves.

 

2 Citation architecture

The citation standard developed by a Committee of the American Bar Association (ABA) is a model of simplicity and flexibility3. It has already been adopted by various concerned parties in the United States and even abroad4. Elements of this model must nevertheless be specified and adapted to the Canadian situation. In this regard, two types of questions must be considered : the standard’s underlying architectural principles and the form of its elements.

2.1 Architectural principles

Architectural principles define the general structure of a citation in the framework of the proposed standard. They dictate the ordering of the elements making up the citation, spell out the rules of development of the standard and attempt to establish an adequate treatment of the bilingual dimension of the Canadian judicial system.

2.1.1 On the ordering of the elements

The core ABA model offers three elements to designate a decision : the year, an identifier chosen by the tribunal itself and an ordinal number of publication. These elements must appear in the given order : year, identifier and number.

We see no major reason to question this ordering. Furthermore, we propose to retain this same ordering from the general to the specific for any elements that could be added to this core of essential elements. It will also apply to sub-elements making up tribunal identifiers.

Proposal 2.1: It is proposed that the standard provide for the ordering of the elements from the general to the specific.

2.1.2 On non-redundancy of information

Recent discussions on the development of a citation standard in Canada indicate various mandatory or optional elements could be added to the core proposed by the ABA. Each of these proposals will have to be examined5. Yet, the standard should not allow information redundancy. Thus, for example, if tribunal identifiers should provide information relative to jurisdiction, the province of the tribunal, the standard would not permit any other way of indicating the province.

Proposal 2.2: It is proposed that the standard offer a single way of providing any information.

2.1.2 (i) On explicitness

As befits a standard aiming to exactly and unambiguously identify documents, all information deemed essential to this task should be explicitly stated.

Proposal 2.2 (i): It is proposed that all information in the citation be stated explicitly.

2.1.2 (ii) On internationalisation

As the development of the envisioned standard takes the current state of the ABA proposal as a starting point and aims to adapt it to the Canadian situation while insuring the standard thus evolved for Canada remains compatible with a future international such standard, it is seen as highly desirable that any step taken to adapt the core citation to our national situation does not add element(s) to the core of the citation as it is now being implemented in American states and discussed in Australia. Hence, if pieces of information must be added to the core of the citation, they should be incorporated into existing elements.

Thus, when the times comes to define an international standard, the internationalisation process should be of merely adding a country code at the left of the citation. Finally, it must be kept in mind that what will come out of our work stands a fair chance of being replicated in the future in other countries that have more than one language.

Proposal 2.2 (ii): It is proposed that no new element be added to the current core of the ABA citation proposal.

2.1.2 (iii) On the use of existing standards

Various standards are already available to designate information that should be part of the citation. Country, provinces, territories, dates and language codes as well as character sets standards are already in wide use. In principle, our standardisation efforts should partake and make use of all these standards. Accordingly, any optional information that might be added to the citation should also use available standards when possible.

Proposal 2.2 (iii): It is proposed that identifiers already provided by applicable Canadian and international standards systematically be used.

2.1.3 On treatment of language

Canadian courts decisions are either published in the English or the French language and sometime in both. In the case of the Supreme Court, both language versions are published simultaneously and have the same official status. In others cases only the version in the language in which the judgment was rendered has official status, the other language version being marked as a translation. The standard must provide for the indication of the language of the document. Following the principles of explicitness and use of existing international standards, the codes "EN" for English and "FR" for French could be used.

In keeping with proposal 2.2 (ii), the language code could be integrated to the tribunal designator, as in 1996 SCCFR 12.

Treatment of language can thus be dealt with at the level of tribunal identification in section 3.2. More specifically, this will involve deciding where the language code will be inserted in the identifier.

Proposal 2.2 (iv): It is proposed that the language of a decision be indicated by the codes "EN" or "FR" within the element identifying the tribunal.

Proposal 2.2 (v): It is proposed that the language of a decision always be indicated in officially bilingual jurisdictions, but not used for decisions rendered in the language of the majority in other, unilingual, jurisdictions. In such unilingual jurisdictions, a language code should be used only when a decision is rendered in a minority language, or for a translation from the majority language to that minority language.

2.2 The form of elements

Whatever the architecture and ordering, and even before considering specific elements, it seems sensible to narrow down the form these elements might take. In this respect, we must consider the character set, the question of capital and small letters, the use of separators to distinguish elements from one another and existing standard that could enlighten our own standardisation efforts.

2.2.1 On the character set

One of the goals of this project is to allow convenience of use of the new citations in the increasingly electronic environment of legal documentation. To this end, we feel that characters used should be limited to digits and unaccented characters. This way, using these citations to make up file names or URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) in the context of the Internet won’t pose any problem with current computer systems.

In the future, this solution could be re-examined. When all computer systems can use French accented characters in file names and URLs, we will be able to revise the standard to extend it to these characters. Such a revision would maintain compatibility with citations produced using the original standard.

Proposal 2.3: It is proposed that the character set used in citations be basic ASCII, now know as the ISO/IEC 646 standard, essentially the characters available on an English-only typewriter keyboard.

2.2.2 On the use of capital and small letters

Although it doesn’t deal with this question, the ABA committee illustrates its proposal using examples where identifiers contain both capital and small letters. Indeed, it might seem interesting to use both in such a way as to bring out sub-elements making up complex identifiers. At this phase of our work, it seems unnecessary to add such a feature to the standard. It would overlook such a usage: case should not be used to convey information, even if capital or small letters can be used. Thus, a citation made up of either capital or small letters or a mix of both would be valid.

On the one hand, this choice means that we renounce such a feature to subdivide an identifier into its components, but also, on the other hand, that users of the standard won’t have to memorise obscure encoding. It would furthermore be unacceptable that two identifiers could differ only by the type of some characters.

Proposal 2.4: It is proposed that the standard be case-insensitive.

2.2.3 On separators

To help readability, the various components making up a citation should be separated. Furthermore, if we are to plan for the addition of optional sub-elements and if we must also enforce a strict hierarchical organisation from the general to the specific, it remains unsure that the mere alternation of numbers and character strings might suffice in all cases.

To convey numerous and very specific pieces of information, traditional citations of a bibliographic nature use a variety of separators : parentheses, brackets, commas and sometimes even periods. The citation we're aiming for must limit itself to source documents and be simple to use. To this end, the choice of allowed separators should be as limited as possible.

Proposal 2.4 (i): For readability, an optional space can be used between elements of the core of the citation, an optional coma between the ordinal number and the optional paragraph pin-point and an optional period before optional suffixes to the ordinal number.For clarity, a mandatory period must be used before a tribunal subdivision identifier within the tribunal element, a mandatory hyphen must be used between the English and French identifiers of tribunals in bilingual jurisdictions and a mandatory hyphen must be used between paragraph numbers when more than one is cited in an optional pin-point citation.

2.2.4 On the use of other existing standards (previous version relocated : see section 2.1.2 (iii)

2.2.4.1 Designating a country

The global dimension of the Internet which will soon be the principal vector of legal information brings us to consider inserting our standard in a yet to come international system. In such a case we would use the ISO notation " CA " to indicate the country of origin of Canadian judicial decisions6.

2.2.4.2 Designating a province or territory

In keeping with section 2.1.2 (ii), designation of Canadian provinces and territories will be a part of the tribunal identifier as an indication of jurisdiction and should make use of the existing Canadian standard using two letter codes for each of these jurisdictions.

2.2.4.3 Indicating a date

Indication of the year of publication is at the core of the proposed standard. We see a four digit code. For the rest, if optional elements using dates are allowed, the eight digit ISO date encoding should be used7.

Proposal 2.5: It is proposed that the standard use ISO codes for countries and dates. For provinces and territories of Canada, the international postal standard will be used.

2.2.5 On the length of identifiers

Identifiers can be used to carry various pieces of information. We will however have to limit them to their essential elements for the citation to remain simple and easy to use. The length of identifiers plays a key role in this respect.

Our position in this regard is that the shorter identifiers designate the tribunal of an higher level. These identifiers could generally be abbreviations of the names of tribunals. Federal courts identifiers would be the briefest, compared to those of other Canadian superior courts would include province or territory codes to indicate jurisdiction. Names of other judicial or administrative instances being generally longer, so would be their identifier. For example, in Quebec, we would have the following identifiers for the Court of Appeal, the Superior Court, the Quebec Court, its Youth Division and the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal : " QCCA ", " QCSC ", " QCQC-Y ", " QCHRT ". We believe eight characters should be able to deal with all cases. But such a limit would only be a recommendation, not a constraint.

Proposal 2.6: It is proposed that the suggested length of court identifiers be of eight characters or less. The standard will also accept longer identifiers.

 

3 Essential elements of the standard

Three mandatory and one optional elements constitute the core of the projected standard. The first three are the year of the decision, the tribunal identifier and an ordinal number designating each decision of a tribunal in a given year. The optional paragraph number allows pin-point citing.

3.1 The year of the decisions

The first element of the citation will be the four digit year of the decision. Given this, what step of the processing of a decision by a tribunal the citation to a judgement will be associated with remains to be seen. For the purposes of the standard, it is proposed the date at which a judgement is rendered by a tribunal be retained. Thus, a case opened in 1997 for which the judgement is rendered in 1998 will be given the year " 1998 " as part of its citation. We believe this choice will be easier on court administrators. Ordinal numbers would be attributed when judgements are rendered, whether motives are written or not.

Alternatively, only published decisions could be numbered. If this second option were retained, a decision rendered on the bench in 1997, for which motives would subsequently be published, in 1998, for example, would be attributed the date " 1998 ". Unpublished decisions couldn’t be referred to using the standard; it is not clear whether this is preferable or not. We will have to study this issue. Also see further the section on the attribution of ordinal numbers to decisions.

Proposal 3.0: The year date used in the citation to a judgment should be that of the date at which that judgment was rendered.

3.2 The tribunal identifier

The tribunal identifier must be simple, mnemonic and its structure must reflect the hierarchical ordering of the judiciary. Its mode of construction must also allow delegating to competent authorities of various Canadian jurisdictions the choice of the identifiers of their own tribunals. Finally this choice must be in harmony with the bilingual dimension of the Canadian judiciary system.

Defining a proper framework for the attribution of tribunal identifiers is at the core of the development of the proposed standard. It is a question of great importance and for this reason its resolution must be a priority. The main considerations are the following.

Identifiers must be simple. They will be made of letters and remain brief. To reaffirm our purpose: our intent is to produce document identifiers, not to describe the Canadian judicial system.

The identifiers’ internal structure will be hierarchical, from the general to the specific. This means the order of their sub-elements will be defined by the standard.

The identifier’s structure must allow their decentralised attribution by judicial authorities of various Canadian jurisdictions. However, a framework supporting this attribution process will be provided to insure the cohesion of identifiers. Designations of similar tribunals should also be similar. An example of such similitude would be the case of courts of appeal, for which only the province designation would be different. Finally, it is worth noting that a decentralised approach locating a province code as a prefix of a tribunal identifier would afford the additional benefit of providing the jurisdiction the cited decision emanates from.

Finally, these identifiers must be in harmony with the bilingual context of our judicial system.

State of the matter: A framework allowing the attribution of identifiers for all Canadian tribunals should be developed. Four elements are fundamental to this task : simplicity, hierarchical ordering of sub-elements, decentralisation of the attribution process and the bilingual dimension of the Canadian judicial system.

Proposal 3.0 (i): In officially bilingual jurisdictions, that is federal courts and New-Brunswick, tribunal identifiers should be bilingual and composed of identifiers in both languages with a mandatory separator in between. In other jurisdictions, the tribunal identifiers should remain unilingual, in the jurisdiction's official or majority language.

3.3 The ordinal number of the decision

The attribution of ordinal numbers to a tribunal’s decisions doesn’t require the prior existence of a Canadian standard for such a matter. A tribunal can decide to number each and every one of its decisions, be they motions or motivated decisions. Also, the numbering can be done in the order the judgements are rendered or in the one in which the written motives of the decisions warranting them are published. All things considered, it boils down to giving a unique number to each decision of a tribunal in a given year.

However, guidelines should be provided on the better way of attributing this numbering. To this end, we must ensure collaboration of senior court administrators so our recommendations fit naturally in current court work processes. The numbers used for the new citation shouldn’t be too long. Although nothing opposes in principle to an arbitrary length, in practice the standard’s ease of use would require suggesting (imposing?) a maximum length of eight digits to these numbers.

It must be taken into account that all Canadian tribunals already use docket numbers or other case numbers. Relations between these various codes and the sought ordinal number for the neutral citation standard ought to be examined. More specifically, might not the docket number provide the basis for this ordinal number? At first glance, it would seem not. Indeed, for many tribunals the same docket number can be used in several decisions. In our view, this would prevent direct derivation of the ordinal number from the docket number, as the ordinal number must be unique in a given year. Furthermore, docket number vary a lot. Some courts use numeric codes, as does the Supreme Court; others use alphanumeric codes, like the Federal Court; others still, among them Quebec courts, use long hyphenated composite numbers. The authors feel attempting to attach such disparate pieces of information to the other elements of the envisioned standard would be inopportune.

The situation of the more complex tribunals must be considered. The Federal Court of Canada sits in numerous Canadian cities; should it use a different sequence of ordinal numbers for each of these cities or, to the contrary, a sole integrated sequences? The same goes for several provincial superior courts. Attributing a number sequence to each office of the court would also allow local attribution of ordinal numbers. This way the unity of a tribunal’s collection of decisions would be preserved and attribution of ordinal numbers would still be simple and decentralised. A centralised approach can also be used : a tribunal could choose to attribute ordinal numbers to its decisions in a centralised fashion even if it has several offices of the court.

Proposal 3.1: It is proposed that a mode of attribution of ordinal numbers adapted to complex tribunals be suggested. However tribunals will be free to attribute these numbers in the way they see fit.

Proposal 3.1 (i): It is proposed the standard recommends the numbering of all decisions when feasible, but that it be up to courts to see when they can implement such a recommendation.

Proposal 3.2: It is proposed the standard suggests a maximum of eight digits for ordinal numbers attributed to decisions.

3.4 The paragraph numbers

Paragraph numbering for pin-point reference to case law is getting growing acceptance in Canada. Since the great majority of Canadian superior courts have already adopted the document preparation standards issued by the Canadian Judiciary Council, we see paragraph numbering being included in more and more of their documents at the time of creation8. It is only a matter of time for other tribunals to adopt this practice and for its usage to become universal.

To complete the elaboration of the core of our citation standard, there only remains choosing the code or separator introducing the paragraph number. The ABA Committee recommends using the paragraph code " ¶ ". Some believe this symbol to be still too relatively unknown to be convenient for our standard and would prefer the character chain " para " to differentiate a reference to a paragraph from one to page using " p ".

A specific code or separator would have the added advantage of enabling reference to a group of paragraphs, as in " ¶ 15-22 ".

Question 3.2: Should paragraph information be introduced by a separator, the coma already in use in the ABA proposal, which then becomes mandatory, or by a specific symbol, making the coma optional, for readability?

 

4 Optional elements and other specific matters

4.1 On the compatibility of the proposed Canadian neutral citation standard with an international citation system (replaced by section 2.1.2 (ii) )

4.2 On the judicial hierarchy

Any tribunal in Canada can be positioned in the judicial hierarchy. Such information about the tribunal releasing a judgement could be indicated in a citation. However, adding such information of a descriptive nature would burden the citation and so be contrary to the goal of simplicity sought.

Proposal 4.1: It is proposed not to provide for the addition of information about the hierarchical level of the tribunal.

4.3 On chambers, subdivisions and judicial districts

Some Canadian tribunals are large and complex organisations. Various encoding methods have been developed to indicate the precise origin of various decisions from within such courts9. In Quebec, for example, docket numbers provide for sub-fields indicating specifics chambers and judicial districts of origin.

Since the citation must identify a document rather than describe tribunal organisation, it is not opportune to provide a means to indicate the precise origin of a decision. It must be said, however, that ordinal number attribution in complex tribunals will in many cases have to use numbers series, thus essentially providing information on the precise origin of a decision.

Proposal 4.2: The standard shouldn't provide optional segments to specify the internal structure of tribunals.

4.4 On the reach of the standard and the inclusion of quasi-judicial bodies

We aim to develop a very general standard enabling the citation of any case law that could be referred to in the activities of Canadian judicial practice. The anticipated reach of the standard is thus very broad. The delegation of attribution of identifiers, the framework of which remains to be defined, will solve what could be the problem of having a sole committee define any and all identifiers for a few hundred judicial or quasi-judicial bodies. The necessity of developing such a framework guiding the choice of identifiers that would also be applicable to quasi-judicial bodies, inasmuch as the latter is possible, should be considered.

Question 4.3: Should the method of attributing identifiers to tribunals also be applicable to quasi-judicial bodies, or should a specific encoding be necessary to indicate quasi-judicial sources of case law?

4.5 On various qualifiers of decisions

Previous proposals like the ABA’s provide for the addition of codes indicating various pieces of information on cited decisions. In this regard, the case of decisions their authors have wanted to deprive of any jurisprudencial value must be considered. Such decisions are sometimes marked as " unpublished ". Corrigenda occasionally published by courts could also be provided for. Some authors of judgements even speak in terms of versions! In a similar vein, some suggest codes to discern motions from more substantial decisions. Should the Canadian standard provide for the addition of such information, and if so, how?

A simple approach would be to add a literal suffix to the ordinal number of the decision. The opportunity of adding such codes should be examined. Furthermore, providing for language neutral codes would prove very useful. For the time being, the addition of codes such as " U " (unreported) and " R " (revised) could be considered.

Question 4.4: Should the standard provide for specific encoding of decision qualifiers?

4.6 On references to notes

The standard should enable precise reference to notes sometimes used in judicial decisions. Although it can likely be done simply and intuitively, standardising such references should nevertheless be attempted. An obvious solution would be a code similar to that of paragraphs. Thus, a reference to a note could take the form : " n18 ".

Proposal 4.3: It is proposed pin-point references to notes be indicated by the letter "n" immediately followed by the number of the note.

4.7 On note-up possibilities

A choice should be made at this point early in the process of development of the envisioned standard. Such a standard can’t be all to everyone. On one hand, docket numbers yield themselves well to note-up of decisions, judicial history and subsequent treatment, but they do not uniquely identify decisions. On the other hand, the envisioned citation specifically identifies decisions, but for this very reason doesn’t naturally yield itself to note-up. The possibilities of the standard under development in this regard should be examined.

Question 4.6: How, and to what extent, should we favour note-up possibilities in the citation standard?

 

5 Relations of this proposal with previous ones

When the standard proposal is better established, a table comparing our conclusions with previous and foreign proposals should be prepared. Special attention should be given the to case numbering project developed by the Canadian Law Information Centre in the 1980’s. The same should be done with US proposals.

 

Proposals and questions

Proposal 1.1: It is proposed that the citation be unique, medium-independent and simply but precisely identify decisions rather than attempt to describe them.

Proposal 1.2: It is proposed that tribunal designation based on the standard be attributed by judicial authorities.

Proposal 1.3: It is proposed that citations be attributed to decisions by the tribunals themselves.

Proposal 2.1: It is proposed that the standard provide for the ordering of the elements from the general to the specific.

Proposal 2.2: It is proposed that the standard offer a single way of providing any information.

Proposal 2.2 (i): It is proposed that all information in the citation be stated explicitly.

Proposal 2.2 (ii): It is proposed that no new element be added to the current core of the ABA citation proposal.

Proposal 2.2 (iii): It is proposed that identifiers already provided by applicable Canadian and international standards systematically be used.

Proposal 2.2 (iv): It is proposed that the language of a decision be indicated by the codes "EN" or "FR" within the element identifying the tribunal.

Proposal 2.2 (v): It is proposed that the language of a decision always be indicated in officially bilingual jurisdictions, but not used for decisions rendered in the language of the majority in other, unilingual, jurisdictions. In such unilingual jurisdictions, a language code should be used only when a decision is rendered in a minority language, or for a translation from the majority language to that minority language.

Proposal 2.3: It is proposed that the character set used in citations be basic ASCII, now know as the ISO/IEC 646 standard, essentially the characters available on an English-only typewriter keyboard.

Proposal 2.4: It is proposed that the standard be case-insensitive. Thus case will not be used to convey information, even if capital or small letters can be used.

Proposal 2.4 (i) (replaces and answers question 2.3): For readability, an optional space can be used between elements of the core of the citation, an optional coma between the ordinal number and the optional paragraph pin-point and an optional period before optional suffixes to the ordinal number.For clarity, a mandatory period must be used before a tribunal subdivision identifier within the tribunal element, a mandatory hyphen must be used between the English and French identifiers of tribunals in bilingual jurisdictions and a mandatory hyphen must be used between paragraph numbers when more than one is cited in an optional pin-point citation.

Proposal 2.5: It is proposed that the standard use ISO codes for countries and dates. For provinces and territories of Canada, the international postal standard will be used.

Proposal 2.6: It is proposed that the suggested length of court identifiers be of eight characters or less. The standard will also accept longer identifiers.

Proposal 3.0: The year date used in the citation to a judgment should be that of the date at which that judgment was rendered.

Proposal 3.0.(i): In officially bilingual jurisdictions, that is federal courts and New-Brunswick, tribunal identifiers should be bilingual and composed of identifiers in both languages with a mandatory separator in between. In other jurisdictions, the tribunal identifiers should remain unilingual, in the jurisdiction's official or majority language.

Proposal 3.1: It is proposed that a mode of attribution of ordinal numbers adapted to complex tribunals be suggested. However tribunals will be free to attribute these numbers in the way they see fit.

Proposal 3.1 (i): It is proposed the standard recommends the numbering of all decisions when feasible, but that it be up to courts to see when they can implement such a recommendation.

Proposal 3.2: It is proposed the standard suggests a maximum of height digits for ordinal numbers attributed to decisions.

Question 3.2: Should paragraph information be introduced by a separator, the coma already in use in the ABA proposal, which then becomes mandatory, or by a specific symbol, making the coma optional, for readability

Proposal 4.1: It is proposed not to provide for the addition of information about the hierarchical level of the tribunal.

Proposal 4.2: The standard shouldn't provide optional segments to specify the internal structure of tribunals.

Question 4.3: Should the method of attributing identifiers to tribunals also be applicable to quasi-judicial bodies, or should a specific encoding be necessary to indicate quasi-judicial sources of case law?

Question 4.4: Should the standard provide for specific encoding of decision qualifiers?

Proposal 4.3: It is proposed pin-point references to notes be indicated by the letter "n" immediately followed by the number of the note

Question 4.6: How, and to what extent, should we favour note-up possibilities in the citation standard?

__________________

1 See Declaration for the elaboration of a vendor-neutral citation standard in Canada

2 See Development of a neutral citation standard for Canadian case law

3 See ABA Official Citation Resolutions,http://www.abanet.org/citation/resolution.html

4 Felsky, Martin, Law Citation in Canada :Proposals for Reform, 16 October 1997, http://www.kingston.net/iknet/call/summit/citation.htmlSee also, Paragraph Numbers in High Court of Australia Judgements and the use of " Media Neutral " Citations, http://www.hcourt.gov.au/short.htm

5 See An International System for the Citation of Court Opinions, http://www.qlsys.ca/intcite.html

6 The ISO standards are ISO 3166-1:1997, Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions -- Part 1: Country codes, and ISO/DIS 3166-2, Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions -- Part 2: Country subdivision code (see ISO Web site at http://www.iso.ch/cate/cat.html and search " country ";see also, for example, http://www.netvista.com/guitarspace/codes.html.

7 The ISO standard is ISO 31-1:1992 Quantities and units -- Part 1: Space and time

8 See Standards for the Preparation, Distribution and Citation of Canadian Judgements in Electronic Form, http://www.integeractif.com/standards.html

9 The CLIC/CBA Decision Numbering System for Canada -- a Proposal, Canadian Law Information Council, January 1988

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