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- Chapter 3 - Researching Legislation
A. Introduction
Author | Ted Tjaden |
Profession | National Director of Knowledge Management McMillan LLP |
Pages | 66-68 |
Page 66
Legislative materials, in the form of statutes, regulations, and statutory instruments, are an important source of law. While some citizens may not realize the power of judge-made case law to affect their rights, most citizens do realize that statutes and regulations have the power to legally affect them. Created by or through elected politicians, legislation consists of written rules that govern or prescribe the conduct of the citizens who elected the government officials. Despite the importance of legislation to our legal system and to legal research, very few people enjoy conducting legislative research.
There are several reasons why legislative research can be a challenge:
· Until recently, legislation was mired in 19th-century print technology, replete with publishing delays, poor consolidation of amended provisions, and awkward "Tables" for updating changes to legislative text.
· The legislative process is still somewhat mysterious to most people, involving a sense of back-room lobbying and various technical legislative rules, such as the need for bills to progress through three readings before becoming law.
· Legislation involves a fairly obscure vocabulary and literature unfamiliar to the uninitiated, including such concepts or terms as proroguement, Royal Assent, proclamations, and Orders-in-Council (these terms are explained below in this chapter).
Page 67
Fortunately, legislators are improving access to legislation on their websites. Although some governments have been slow to make their online versions of legislation official, the federal,1Ontario,2and Québec3governments have done so, and it is reasonable to assume that the other Canadian jurisdictions will do so in the near future. The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CANLII) (www.canlii.org) is also an excellent central "clearing house" for recent federal and provincial legislation.
Although the emphasis in this chapter will be using online resources for legislative research, there will also be a brief review of print resources. There are several occasions when there is no choice but to use print resources: (i) since online legislative databases tend to emphasize current content, it will still be necessary in most situations to conduct print legislative research for historical research, such as needing to confirm the state of the law at a period of time in the past, and (ii) since not all Canadian provincial jurisdictions have moved as quickly in making the...
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