Introduction

• Author: John Eaton
• Pages: 13-14

INTRODUCTION xiii

Introduction

In the years that I have been instructing law students in the process of undertaking legal re-

search, I have always emphasized the importance of beginning one’s research with secondary

sources. It is in these sources that one f‌inds distillations, explanations, and analyses of the

law. In other words, it is in these sources that the researcher f‌inds much of the “heavy-lifting”

of legal research and analysis already performed for him. Unless one is particularly expert in

an area of law, it is not usually advisable to begin one’s research by reading numerous cases

and statutes hoping to divine from them the common thread that leads to conclusions as to

the state of the law on that issue. As such, it becomes a signif‌icant part of the research process

to refer to secondary texts and similar materials. This work attempts to inform researchers as

to the most “essential” sources on a wide range of legal subtopics that cover almost the entire

discipline.

This work grows out of co-author Denis Le May’s seminal work on sources of Québec

law, Les références essentielles en droit québécois, originally published in 1996. It is an attempt to

marry an updated version of Le May’s sources on Québec law, of which many of the topics are

specif‌ically based in the province’s Civil Code, with sources from the common-law portion of

Canada, making this work one which is applicable throughout the entire country — geograph-

ically, linguistically, and juridically.

The most challenging part of this work was determining which titles were “essential.”

No specif‌ic def‌inition of “essential” was in my mind throughout this process other than to

consider “essential” to be an amalgam of the following attributes: currency, coherence, and

comprehensiveness. With this in mind, I spent years personally assessing as many sources as

I could and discussing with numerous academics and practitioners their opinions about vari-

ous titles. This work has grown from that investigation.

Denis and I spent many hours burning up email and telephone lines discussing how best

to organize this book. We decided that we would organize each topic alphabetically by its Eng-

lish equivalent and list both English common-law sources with French sources (many of which

are grounded in the Civil Code). Within each list we would list the titles according to currency,

with looseleaf publications listed f‌irst (under the presumption that over the years, these will

remain the most current) followed by titles in reverse chronological order of publication (i.e.,

the most recently published are listed f‌irst). It should also be noted that it is not always the

case that the most essential source is a book. The most cogent work on a topic is sometimes

found in a legal encyclopedia, such as the Canadian Encyclopedic Digest, or Halsbury’s Laws of