Legal Reasoning Tool: Guide to Canadian Legal Citation
OJEN Legal Reasoning Tools are designed to provide high school students with the skills to investigate legal issues, identify perspectives and think critically about legal developments within the classroom and beyond. These tools assist students in applying the legal inquiry process by guiding them through the stages of formulating questions, gathering and organizing information, interpreting and analyzing legal issues, evaluating and drawing conclusions, and communicating their findings.
Legal matters are one way in which society makes difficult decisions and these decisions can have important consequences for individuals and communities. Legal writing is a way of recording how these decisions were made, so that other people can understand them and even revisit and change them in the future. Citations allow others to find the sources that were used so they can consider them on their own and help to clarify which authors are putting forth which ideas or arguments. The information in this resource is based entirely on the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, 7th ed (Toronto: Carswell, 2010). It addresses some of the most commonly-used rules in language that is accessible to secondary students.