Reflection

Scenario: An academic research guide for humanities undergrad students to be able to access open-source legal resources for research.

Audience: Humanities (particularly sociology) undergraduate students at Trent University. Students who don’t have much exposure to working with legal documents but still want to write about how law and society interact in a multi-disciplinary way.

I used to work at a Trent satellite campus and putting together a guide like this for a professor’s class wouldn’t have been uncommon for my supervisors. Since Trent doesn’t have a law school – and also doesn’t have many library guides or resources for legal research – I thought it would make sense for the pre-approved open-source legal resources prompt.

Method for identifying resources:

At first, I honestly just Googled free or open source Canadian resources to see what was out there. Unsurprisingly, that resulted in hit-or-miss results. I also tried library guides from a few university libraries across the country, but most of them only recommended the expensive paid databases.

So instead I focused on looking at reputable law associations and organizations for resources, which turned out to be very helpful. I believe the Ontario Bar Association that had page on open-source resources that led me to Osgoode Hall’s Digital Commons and its many open-source publications. From there I found resources recommended by other law library guides.

Rationale behind inclusion:

The resources I included came in roughly four main forms. Journals and General Commentary: SSRN, Osgoode Digital Commons Journals

  • Because of the scenario, it was likely that a non-law humanities student would be more interested in secondary sources on legal issues than the laws themselves. They would also benefit from having potentially confusing legal situations described through commentary from experts. For that reason, it made sense to focus most of my resources on journal resources if possible.

    • Supreme Court Commentary

  • The nature of Supreme Court cases is that they can stir up more attention than other courts and be tied to broad societal changes. I remember them coming up more frequently in my undergraduate classes than anything else for this reason. So I thought the audience might find commentary from legal experts about those decisions helpful if they too were researching it.

    • Case Law

  • There is simply no open-source law resource list without CanLII. Plus they have useful guides, video tutorials, and handouts.

    • Decoding Legalese - Legal terminology and abbreviations can be dense and confusing, so wanted to include some reputable sources to help students translate them. It seemed useless to have a guide like this without it.