Speaker 1: Finding and Understanding Legislation and Case Law This bonus content from 5-Minute Family Law is all about understanding the letters and numbers that appear after the names of cases and statutes, and about finding those cases and statutes online once you've figured out what the letters and numbers mean. The formal name of the Divorce Act, the site for the Divorce Act, is the Divorce Act R.S.C. 1985 C-3 Second Sub. The site for the Family Law Act is the Family Law Act S.B.C. 2011 C-25. Let's talk about those letters and numbers. The Family Law Act is the name of the statute. S.B.C. tells us that the Family Law Act is a law of the province of British Columbia. 2011 is the year in which the law was passed. The C in C-25 stands for Chapter, and what that tells us is that the Family Law Act was the 25th law passed by the Legislature of British Columbia in 2011. The Divorce Act is a bit different. Its site refers to an R.S.C. R.S.C. stands for the Revised Statutes of Canada. Once every two, three, or four decades, governments usually organize all the laws they've passed alphabetically into a consolidated volume of statutes, all of which are referred to by the same R.S.C. number. The point of this is to make it easier to find legislation and also to save everybody from the hassle of having to remember in what year a particular law was passed. So for the R.S.C. 1985, that consolidation contains all of the laws passed before 1985 that are still in effect. What's revised about those laws is their sites. And so in this case, the Divorce Act is Chapter 3 of the second supplement to the Revised Statutes of Canada. But here's an example of a statute that was passed after the 1985 consolidation. The COVID-19 Emergency Response Act, S.C. 2020, C.5. S.C. tells us that the COVID-19 Emergency Response Act is a law of Canada. 2020 is the year in which the law was passed. C.5 tells us that this was the fifth act passed by the Parliament of Canada this year. Now, if you want to get fancy and refer to a specific spot in that act, you might add another letter and another number. This example refers to Section 6 of the COVID-19 Emergency Response Act. And that is how you refer to a specific section of a piece of legislation. So now that we're talking about the formal bits and pieces of what's on the inside of legislation, let's get into that in a lot more detail. Laws that are very long might be broken into parts. Parts are typically numbered with Arabic numerals or with Roman numerals. And sometimes very long parts are broken into divisions. And divisions are also either numbered in Arabic or Roman numerals. But not all laws include parts and divisions. The Family Law Act does because it is a very large piece of legislation. But the Marriage Prohibited Degrees Act runs to something like six sections, maybe less. And so it doesn't have any parts or divisions. So sections are the real meat and potatoes of a piece of legislation. Most of the time when you refer to a part of a law, you're going to be referring to a section. Sections are referred to in Arabic numerals. Sections are sometimes broken down into subsections. Subsections are also referred to in Arabic numerals. And the difference between a section and a subsection number is that subsections have the Arabic numeral within brackets. Subsections sometimes contain paragraphs. And paragraphs are numbered with lowercase letters, also within brackets. And paragraphs sometimes contain subparagraphs. Subparagraphs are numbered in lowercase Roman numerals, also within brackets. So here's an example from section six of the Family Law Act. This entire thing is all section six. But if you wanted to refer to just subsection one, and subsection one runs from subject to this act down to the implementation of an agreement or order, you would refer to section six, sub one. But not all subsections contain all those paragraphs and subparagraphs. Some subsections are just a single line, like subsection two and subsection three. Inside subsection one, you can see that we have paragraph A as well as paragraph B. And inside paragraph B, we have subparagraph I and subparagraph II. So how we use these is we use the numbers to help us pinpoint the specific spot in a section that we're referring to. So let's say we're talking about subsection two, a single agreement may be made respecting one or more matters. We would write that this way, Family Law Act, section six, bracket two, close bracket. We would say, oh, that's Family Law Act section six, sub two. Let's say we wanted to refer to a paragraph, a specific paragraph. We would write this as Family Law Act, section six, sub four, sub C. And to refer to a specific subparagraph, it would be Family Law Act, section six, sub one, sub B, sub three. Some people actually spell out the Roman numerals saying III, but that sounds a bit silly. I just prefer to say three. Now let's explore how we refer to statutes in a little more detail and talk about some abbreviations. We have already run into the abbreviation for the word chapter, and that's C. We've also seen the abbreviation for section, which is S. If we are referring to more than one section, the plural sections is spelled SS. You spell subsection S hyphen S, and the plural is S hyphen SS. And you can probably guess that the abbreviation for page is P, and that the abbreviation for multiple pages is PP. Now sometimes governments need to add parts to a law, and you can imagine the problems that would come up if you added a new section three so that the old section three became section four and the old section four became section five. It would mess everything up, including all the cases that have talked about specific sections. What they do is they add a new section or a new subsection or a new paragraph by adding a decimal point in another number. And so if you're talking about a new section 2.1, you know that that appears between old section two and a new section three. And if you wanted to add a new section after 2.1, you would call it 2.2. So here's an example from section 10 of the Family Law Act. And here you can see that between section, sorry, subsection two and subsection three, the government has added subsection 2.1. And so the way you say that when you're referring to it is, this is the Family Law Act section 10 sub 2.1. Now let's move on and talk about cases. This is the case of LEG and AG. The V stands for versus, but we usually just say and. The initials that you see are the initials of the names of the people that are involved in this case. Over the last 10 to 15 years in particular, we have more and more been referring to the people involved in a case by their initials rather than their full names. This is to give them, and more importantly their children, a little bit of a sense of privacy. The old-fashioned site for LEG and AG, and the kind of site you'll see that for most cases before the year 2000, looks like this. In this case, LEG and AG is the name of the case, 2003 was the year the case was decided, and RFL stands for the name of the reporter series in which you can find this case. Let's go back in time. The origin of the English common law had to do with former lawyers and people that aren't lawyers at all who would go to court, listen to the lawyers arguing a case, and then write down the main arguments and write down what the judge had to say when the judge was making a decision. This was a way of recording the law, and it became the foundation of the common law as each other judge that was dealing with the case after that case was now bound to follow the principles that were enunciated by that first judge. All sorts of different people would do this, and these became known as reporter series, and there were dozens of them, usually known by the last names of the individual that was physically going to court and then taking notes and writing up these cases. This has continued, and what I remember before the internet became what it is today is that family law firms would typically subscribe to at least one reporter series, usually the RFL, which stands for Reports on Family Law, and is without a doubt the premier family law reporting series in Canada. Once every three or four weeks, we'd get a softcover edition of a handful of cases that had just been decided, and then a couple of weeks after that, we'd get a hardbound version that consolidated two or three of those softcover things, and the books just kept coming and kept coming and kept coming. And so law offices used to be just festooned with row after row after row of these reporter series, and in fact, they are what you usually see in the promotional photographs that lawyers used to publish. So here's this very nice and undoubtedly competent lawyer in front of a rack of reporter series. Here's somebody else in front of another rack of reporters, and here's a nice fellow doing his sales pitch in front of a rack of reporters, and here's somebody else. The thing is, since the year 2000 at least, we've had very good search functionality available online, both in free and paid format, and so the reality is that these people have probably never cracked the spine of any of the books that are sitting behind them on those shelves looking ever so handsome. Anyways, getting back to this case. So the Reports on Family Law is the name of the reporter series. Fifth stands for the series, and each series usually has 100 or more volumes within it, and 37 is the volume in the fifth series where you will find this case printed, and the case appears beginning at page 111, and the decision is a decision of the British Columbia Supreme Court. And so, if you wanted to say this as a sentence, you would say, I am referring to the case of L.E.G. and A.G., which you can find at page 111 of the 37th volume of the fifth series of the Reports on Family Law. The contemporary way of referring to these cases, and you'll see that most cases past the year 2000 have this, is through something called a neutral citation, which is way simpler. In this particular case, L.E.G. and A.G., it's the name of the case, 2003 is the year the case was decided, B.C.S.C. is the abbreviation for the name of the court that decided the case, and 412 is the decision in the order of the number of decisions that had been released that year. So if you wanted to say this in a sentence format, you would say that L.E.G. versus A.G. is the 412th decision released by the Supreme Court of British Columbia in 2003. So let's quickly cover some of those abbreviations of courts. B.C.P.C. is the abbreviation for the British Columbia Provincial Court, B.C.S.C., the Supreme Court, B.C.C.A., the Court of Appeal, and of course, S.C.C. stands for the Supreme Court of Canada. Now, since the dawn of the internet, it has become ever so much easier to find legislation and case law. I do almost all of my work, if not all of my work, through the website of the Canadian Legal Information Institute, which you can find at www.canly.org. This is what the page looks like. Canly is a marvelous resource, and it's paid for by Lawyers' Law Society fees from all across Canada. And it's free to both the public and to the profession. And so there are two ways that you can look something up on Canly. First is using that top search field where it says document text. And so in there, you might type a search phrase like child support or parenting time COVID-19 or something like that. However, since you now know how to find the names of legislation as well as the sites for legislation and cases, you might as well go straight here. And in fact, this is one of the easiest ways to do it, as long as you know the name of the law or the name of the case that you're looking at. And so the nice thing about Canly is that it has a predictive search function. So when I'm looking up LEG and AG, I only had to get this far before the case I was looking for shows up. And you can see that there are two decisions involving the same people, one from 2002 and one from 2003. And it's the 2003 case that I was looking for. Or because you now know the site for LEG and AG, you could just enter that. And so when I type in 2003 BCSC 412, you see right there, it's the first search result that was returned. And when you click on that link or hit enter, what you get is the case itself. And you can scroll down and read everything that the judge had to say in the fight between this couple. Now, you can also find legislation on Canly. And with that predictive search functionality, I only had to get as far as DIVO before divorce turned up and the Divorce Act. And so you click on that, and it gives you the entire text of the Divorce Act. Really awesome stuff. And again, that's the Canadian Legal Information Institute. And you can find that website at www.canly.org. And that is how you find and understand legislation and case law in British Columbia.