Guide to Purchasing Law Reports

Sam Coghlan was Deputy Director and Senior Consultant of the Thames Ontario Library Service Board, Southwestern Ontario.

Our law is created not only by Parliament or by the provincial legislatures. Courts make law — when they interpret acts or when they make decisions in areas uncovered by legislation. The principle of precedent establishes that in similar situations one court will generally be required to follow the example of a superior or, sometimes, an equal court.

It is this principle over any other which most determines the nature of a lawyer’s work when she or he must find the law that governs a given situation. The lawyer must search for relevant legislation and case law. Therefore, law reports exist. These publish the decisions (or digests of the decisions) of courts.

The book under review is designed to aid in the selection from among Canadian law reports of “those titles most appropriate for a particular small to medium sized law office library.” It succeeds as a consumer aid for law firms and law libraries. Otherwise, beyond its supplying a list of Canadian law reports as well as evidence of the immensity of the body of case law generated in Canada, it is of little interest to anyone else.

The list is comprehensive and includes interesting categories of information for persons wishing to evaluate and/or compare law reports. Data alone is provided, although conclusions seem to be begging to be drawn as to the practises of a publishing field dominated by a handful of firms.

An area of concern in assessing law reports is the lapse of time from the date of a court’s judgment to the appearance of the decision in a law report. The sooner the better. Dozens of the law reports were measured for timeliness in 1984 for this publication and earlier in 1979. In most cases improvements have been made in this regard since 1979. One would like to believe that the presence of evaluations of their work has contributed to the publishers’ desire to improve. It is hoped that this volume will precipitate similar improvements in services.