Reflex Citator
Reflex is CanLII's citator. It processes citations to case law and legislation found in CanLII's content in order to establish relationships between citing and cited documents, thus improving navigation and research on the website.
In the past, CanLII's team compiled hundreds of thousands of citations to main Canadian case law reports. Now, most citations added to Reflex are harvested and processed by computer programs from documents published on CanLII. Reflex uses this data to find parallel citations associated with a cited decision. Once a new citation from a parallel citation set is known, Reflex infers that the other parallel citations of the same set are related to the same decision. Reflex thus "learns" new citations over time and continues to improve. The widespread use of the Neutral citation standard for case law (1999) in decisions enables Reflex to yield a high rate of recognized cited decisions.
It should be noted that the system recognizes properly styled citations, while tolerating several common variations. This automation may entail a certain rate of incorrect linking but we choose to obtain a high level of reliability even if it means adding fewer links.
Hyperlinks
Using a database of citations to case law and legislative materials, Reflex creates heavily interlinked documents. The following figure illustrates various types of hypertext links added by CanLII. Letters A and B provide descriptions of these types of links.
a) When a cited decision is successfully identified and associated to another decision available on CanLII, a hyperlink towards this decision is inserted. Cited decision hyperlinks are displayed using the CanLII citation, which is added between the case name and other citations.
b) For Acts and Regulations available on CanLII, hyperlinks are added directly to the titles and section numbers of the cited text. When CanLII finds at least two probable links for a given citation, options are then proposed to the user, as shown below.
Headotes
On the top of each decision on CanLII, right under the decision’s title, you can browse through a series of tabs, each presenting different pieces of information about the decision being consulted :
- The “Document” tab displays the decision itself;
- Clicking on the “History” tab will display a list of decisions issued in the same matter as the decision being consulted (either by the same court, or by lower or upper level courts). Decisions issued by appeal courts are associated to their trial level decisions since January 2006;
- Clicking on the “Cited Documents” tab will display a list of documents that are cited in the consulted decision, including legislation (statutes and regulations) and decisions;
- Clicking on the “Treatment” tab will display 3 "subtabs". The "Citations" subtab shows a list of cases that cite the decision being consulted in reverse chronological order. The "Discussions" subtab shows a list of documents (decisions and pieces of commentary) sorted in descending order of “discussion identity” (blue jalapeño), including documents with “unfavourable mentions” (yellow jalapeño). The “Unfavourable mentions” subtab applies a filter to the previous subtab to show only documents that had a yellow jalapeño in the previous subtab;
- Finally, clicking on the “CanLII Connects” tab will display a list of posts (summaries or commentary) about the decision being consulted. This content is taken from CanLII Connects, CanLII’s companion website. As of January 2019, CanLII Connects had posts on about 45,000 decisions in the CanLII collection, and this number increases on a daily basis through the work of our volunteer contributors.
Note that the text of the tabs themselves is updated dynamically to indicate the number of documents that will be displayed when clicking on each tab.
CanLII Citation
The CanLII citation is a unique, permanent identifier for decisions available on CanLII. It is the most convenient means of referring to a decision because CanLII reaches the broadest audience and its Website is free of charge and open to all.
The CanLII citation complements the Neutral Citation for Case Law ("neutral citation"), which Canadian courts have gradually been adopting since 1999 in order to establish a unique, permanent method for identifying judicial decisions. The citation has three components: the year of decision, a court or tribunal identifier and a sequential number, which together have the format: 2004 ABCA 38. The neutral citation assigned by the court or tribunal is prominently displayed in the decision's heading or cover page. When a decision does not bear a neutral citation, chances are it has no neutral citation.
When a decision has a neutral citation assigned by the issuing court, the CanLII citation is entirely based upon the neutral citation. A reference to CanLII is simply added between parentheses after the neutral citation, as an indication of the source of the document.
Example: 2004 ABCA 38 (CanLII)
When the court or tribunal has not assigned a neutral citation to a decision, the CanLII citation is composed of the year the decision was rendered followed by "CanLII", a sequential number and finally an abbreviation of the court or tribunal that rendered the decision, between parentheses.
Example: 2002 CanLII 3562 (QC CA)
Note that the IIJCan acronym used in the past in French has been abandoned since the revision of this Website in March 2007. However, the former acronym remains compatible with the search engine, and does not affect search results. For example, typing 2002 IIJCan 2345 yields the same results as typing 2002 CanLII 2345. It is, however, advisable to use only the new uniform CanLII acronym.
The CanLIIDocs citation is a unique, permanent identifier for commentary documents available on CanLII.
Example: 2012 CanLIIDocs 1