Category Archives: legal research

Air & Space Research: Marketline Advantage database

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Marketline Advantage database provides access to case studies, company news, and company reports that contain market size, value, segmentation, shares, leading companies, forecast for each industry, including Aerospace and Defence. For the Aerospace and Defence industry, users can search and browse documents subdivided by subject categories, such as Aerospace Products and Parts Manufacturing, Space Programmes, Vehicle and Aircraft Electronics, etc.

To access the database, go: Law subject guide / Foreign legislation and cases / Air & Space.

NEW Database: Global Health and Human Rights Database

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Last fall, Lawyers Collective and the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University in Washington DC have launched the Global Health and Human Rights Database. The Database is a fully searchable free online database of more than 1000 judgments, constitutions and international instruments on the intersection between health and human rights. The Database is the first attempt to comprehensively make available health and human rights law from both common and civil law jurisdictions, and features case law and other legal documents from more than 80 countries and in 25 languages. It also provides 500 plain-language summaries and 200 original translations of case law previously unavailable in English.

To access the database, go: Law subject guide / Foreign legislation and cases / Human rights.

NEW Database: Annotated Leading Cases of International Criminal Tribunals

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Nahum Gelber Law Library is now subscribed on the Annotated Leading Cases of International Criminal Tribunals database. It provides you with the full text of the most important decisions, including concurring, separate and dissenting opinions. Distinguished experts in the field of international criminal law have commented the most important decisions of the ICTY, ICTR, The Special Court for Sierra Leone, The International Criminal Tribunal for Timor-Leste and the ICC. Annotated Leading Cases of International Criminal Tribunals is useful for students, scholars, legal practitioners, judges, prosecutors and defence counsel who are interested in the various legal aspects of the law of the ICTY, ICTR and other forms of international criminal adjudication.

To access the database, go: Law subject guide / Foreign legislation and cases / Human rights.

New Look for the Law Subject Guide

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During the holiday break, we migrated our subject guide to a new tabbed layout. We hope that this design that uses tabs instead of subheadings to divide the subsections will be more conducive to the resource discovery. It allows to avoid vertical scrolling and provides more visibility for the resources that were previously “buried” at the bottoms of the pages.

Survival Guide to the Cite Guide :)

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Last two or three weeks (as usual on this time of year), there was number of students looking for help on how to cite the sources for their first memo. For their benefit, I decided to reiterate my last year’s not-totally-unsolicited advice on the matter.

  1. Ask a librarian for a help. We will not do or check your footnotes, but we will walk you through the maze of the Red Book (no offence meant) to make sure that the next time you will be comfortable to use it by yourself.  Do not be shy to come several times if you need more help, and please, please do not come 5 minutes before your paper is due – in this case, we can only commiserate with you.
  2. When your TL gives you a piece of paper, a pdf, or a photocopy of something, ask what this is, and from where it is coming from (book, website, encyclopaedia, etc.). You will save some precious minutes (or hours) later when you are pressed for time and have to finish your work by a deadline. It is quite unpleasant to discover suddenly that the TL’s piece of paper is a book chapter, and you have no slightest idea about the book title and/ or author.
  3. Do not wait until the last minute to make your footnotes. If you ‘cite while you write’, you will have your paper AND your footnotes ready, except for the final proofing, when you finish writing the last paragraph. If you leave all your footnotes to be done after you finish the paper, you will end up frantically trying to figure out where this or that quotation is coming from, or what all the supra(s) and idem(s) mean. Everybody works differently, but try at least once…
  4. Add some common sense and reasoning to the Red Book. Do not expect it to contain a correct form of footnote for every possible source. Red Book will not necessarily have an answer to your particular question. When you have something to cite, think about what rule fits the best the type of source that you have in hand.
    Read carefully the section to apply the rule, do not scan and skim the text.
  5. In short, to cite a source, proceed as follows:
  • READ General Rules section (optional after you know it by heart)
  • determine what it is that you have to cite
  • find the chapter corresponding to the type of your source (Jurisprudence for cases, Secondary Sources for books and journal articles, etc.)
  • find the section corresponding to the particular source that you have
  • READ this section
  • apply the rule to cite the source making analogies if necessary
  • repeat as needed:)

Dot or no dot (while citing codes) that is the question

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According to the questions that we received at the reference desk recently, there seems to be quite a confusion if a period (full stop/ dot) should be used at the end of the footnote when you are referring to a code. I contacted the editor of the Cite Guide, Alexander Max Jarvie, who kindly provided this clarification that I am sharing with you:

“The period that appears at the end of examples provided elsewhere in the Legislation section is intended as an indication of the terminal period for the entire citation. Although we have removed most periods from citation forms in the 7th edition, a citation footnote is still a sentence and as such punctuation is used in normal fashion. Hence, if the citation to a codal article is the last (or the only) source to be referenced within a particular footnote, a period would follow. To illustrate these rules in practice, I have provided examples below:
2 Art 1214 CCQ.
4 Canada Act 1982 (UK), 1982, c 11.
35 See Canada Act 1982 (UK), 1982, c 11; see also art 1214 CCQ.”

Legal Databases Training for Law Students

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The Nahum Gelber Law Library is pleased to offer database training by legal publishers to the McGill Law School students. The sessions will take place in the Law Library Computer Classroom (main floor of the library) :

  • CAIJ (Centre d’accès à l’information juridique)
    Wednesday, October 30th, 2013 from 12h30-14h
    Me Munja Maksimcev
  • QuickLaw (LexiNexis)
    Friday, November 1st,  2013 from 12h30-14h
    Mr. Ron Jones
  • Azimut-Juris.doc (SOQUIJ)
    Wednesday, November 6th, 2013 from 12h30-14h
    Me Véronique Abad
  • Westlaw Canada (Carswell)
    Friday, November 8th, 2013 from 12h30-14h
    Me Michel Tremblay

Sign-up sheets are available in the Law Library Computer Classroom.

ICLR Online, UK Case Law Database

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The Law Library is happy to offer to our users an access to a newly purchased UK case law database, ICLR Online.

The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales was established in 1865 by members of the legal profession with the object of “preparation and publication, in a convenient form, at a moderate price, and under gratuitous professional control, of Reports of Judicial Decisions of the Superior and Appellate Courts in England and Wales” (Memorandum and Articles of Association, 1870). As well as the official Law Reports, ICLR publishes the Weekly Law Reports, the Industrial Cases Reports, the Business Law Reports, the Public and Third Sector Law Reports and the Statutes and Public and General Acts.

In October 2011, ICLR launched an online database,  ICLR Online. ICLR Online is the hub of legal authorities dating back to 1865. A dedicated case law platform presents  the cases in a comprehensive and readable format. The law reports are combined with the Citator+ to present all the relevant case information in one screen, making legal research easier.

ICLR online can be accessed at Subject guides / Law  / Legislation and cases- foreign jurisdictions