Poulin on Illustrated Judgments

Professor Daniel Poulin of Université de Montréal Faculté de Droit, LexUM, and CanLII has published Illustrated Judgments on Slaw, the Canadian legal blog.

In his post, Professor Poulin gives several examples of images and videos contained in Canadian court decisions published by CanLII. He then offers the following assessment:

So it seems that “illustrated judgments” are here to stay and quite probably they will become even more frequent. Many issues can be identified here. First of all, judgments published in electronic databases must be complete; when images are used by the court they must be present or the means to obtain them must be mentioned. With non-textual elements that are not embedded in the documents, as news video clips, the stability of the element and its continuous availability over time must be ensured. The simple reference to the current URL of a clip is probably not enough to ensure its permanent availability. Thirdly, it could be useful to start elaborating a framework and standards for this new material. The Canadian Citation Committee began to work in that direction in 2002 when it proposed a naming convention for the multimedia material related to a judgment. Probably this work will have to be revisited and completed to follow suit with the judiciary.

Please click here to read the complete post.

HT @trbruce.

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