A Legal Publisher and the McGill Guide

• Author: Susan Munro
• Date: January 16, 2015

Early in my career, when I was a freshly hatched legal editor, I pored over the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (the McGill Guide). It answered many of my questions about the finer points of legal citation: the meaning of square or round brackets; which words should be italicized; the correct order of parallel cites; and so on. I’m pretty sure I was using the first or second edition (we’re talking about 1988 and 1989). The Guide was tremendously helpful to me; although the rules were somewhat complex, they were clearly spelled out and easy to follow. On reflection, I may have been a bit over-enthusiastic in adopting the Guide; at that time, it prescribed the convention of using italics for the name of the parties in a case citation, but not using italics for the v. I’m not sure why I adopted this convention.

For the most part, the McGill Guide has been our go-to guide to answer citation questions here at CLEBC. Our in-house style guide prescribes the use of McGill (and then sets out a long list of exceptions).

But when I was chatting with our copy editor about Louis Mirando’s excellent critique of the recent history of the Guide, she told me that she hadn’t looked at it for over a year. That’s partly a reflection of her considerable memory and experience, but it also aligns with Mirando’s comments about the limitations of the recent editions.

The latest version of the Guide we have here at CLEBC is the fifth edition, published in 2002. Our copy is well-thumbed, flagged, and highlighted, but we haven’t purchased any editions since then. (The most recent edition is number eight, published this fall.)

I parted company with the Guide around the time of the controversy over the omission of periods within abbreviations (the Great Citation Kerfuffle of 2010). The decision not to follow the seventh edition was easy for us: we had adopted the previous style (abbreviations with periods) and had been using it for the thousands and thousands of case citations in our publications. How much work would be involved to change and proof all the citations? What value would we possibly add by changing the style? It was clear to me that we had no good reason to change.

Mirando...