In the McGill citation format, citations are grouped by material type and then alphabetically. For author names, the last name comes first. A correct citation allows researchers to identify and locate sources by providing the maximum amount of information efficiently and consistently. Below is a brief introduction to the citation style of the McGill Guide. Only the most commonly used rules are highlighted and summarized here. To make sure you are following the correct format of the McGill Guide, always read the full guide. When referring to a point in a neutral quote, always quote the paragraph. A typical citation for a Canadian electronic court case that is not in paper form and does not contain a neutral citation contains the following basic elements: The Citation Guide is an indispensable tool for legal writing and is widely used by practitioners, judges, academics and law students across Canada. It is the standard reference work for most Canadian law journals, as well as for many courts (see list below). Many Canadian law schools also use it as a primary tool in teaching legal methodology.
The guide can be purchased by clicking here. A new public resource that allows learners to practice legal citation with interactive exercises. This tutorial complements the content of this guide. No login or registration required: Rule 6.19 provides guidance and examples of citations for exclusively electronic sources, i.e. websites, blog posts and comments, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit posts, podcasts, online videos, social media, electronic journals and other digital media such as CD-ROMs. DVDs, etc. To prevent links from being red (broken links or pages in the future), when citing an item found online, you should include a permanent or archived URL after the normal URL in square brackets. A permalink (also known as a permalink or archive link) is a URL designed to be maintained for many years despite changes to links on a website that may occur in the future.
The McGill Guide strongly recommends that the Perma.CC system create permanent links if they are not provided by the website you are citing. For more information, see Chapter 6.19. If your resource comes from a traditional database, you can always simply put the database abbreviation in parentheses after your traditional citation. Now in its ninth edition, the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation provides a simple and unified approach to citing government documents, case law, statutes, journals, monographs, online sources and other secondary documents in all jurisdictions. This guide has been officially adopted by various courts and major legal reviews across the country and is emerging as an important tool for legal research and writing. The McGill Guide is a bijural and bijural guide to citing legal documents. Exact citation: To properly cite other sources, it is often necessary to provide the exact page or paragraph number of the source you are relying on. This is called a pinpoint. Notes 1, 2 and 4 above show a specific paragraph (“in paragraph ##”), while note 5 shows a specific page (“at ##”). Note that “para” is used for the paragraph, but nothing is written before the Pinpoint page. Articles often have very long titles and are often given a short title that should be used for citation. The short title is usually found in the first section of the act.
Always italicize the title of the act. For complete information or other aspects of citation, please refer to the McGill Guide published in Reference and Reserve (KF 245.C28 2018) at the Bennett Jones Law Library. The book can also be purchased; Look for it in the university bookstore. The following are concrete examples of bibliographic entries from the 8th edition of the McGill Guide. While the fictional story of frogs and toads was amusing elsewhere, it risked confusing all the legal terminology. Unreported cases are those that have not been published in a series of print business journalists. These cases are unlikely to have more than one location. These will be older cases, pre-neutral quote. The neutral citation contains only the year of the decision, a court identifier and the decision number (e.g. 2002 SCC 10).
If there is a neutral citation, it is usually not necessary to include a parallel citation. Include the judge`s name only if you quote directly from the case. The judge`s name appears at the end of the citation, followed by his or her office in the abbreviation (rule 3.10 of the McGill Guide contains abbreviations for judges` offices). There is no comma after the judge`s name. In Canada, legal citation generally follows the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, commonly referred to as the McGill Guide. Legal writing primarily uses footnotes for references. The Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, 9th edition (Toronto: Thomson Reuters, 2018), also known as the McGill Guide, was created to standardize Canadian legal citation and provide a nationally acceptable reference system. The guide has been adopted by numerous Canadian legal publications, including the Queen`s Law Journal, as an authority on legal citations. There are also other excellent free online legal citation guides, such as UBC`s Legal Citation Guide and the Citation Guide for Saskatchewan Courts. In this guide, we focus on an introduction to the latest edition of the McGill Guide.
To clarify all points and for more details, please consult the McGill Guide itself. If there is no neutral citation and the year of the registrant and the year of the decision are different, use both years. Only indicate that a law has been amended if it is relevant to your argument.