TheCourt.ca – Check out our other features

TheCourt.ca is a blogging website, and our blog posts are clearly the front and centre of our focus. But we also have a variety of other features and resources on the website, and I’d like to take this opportunity to showcase them for our readers who haven’t yet snooped through all of our menues.

I’ve provided direct links to the features I mention below, but they all also have links through the “Resources” tab at the top of the screen.

Julian Ho has put together a fantastic interactive timeline of the makeup of the Supreme Court, dating from its inception in 1875 to its present day roster. It graphically displays the approximate tenure of every judge, and by clicking on a particular name, it also displays the precise dates of appointment and retirement.

Tracey Brown has compiled an interactive table, available here, which breaks down and displays the major points of interest for every Supreme Court case decided in 2006. The table documents which judges wrote the decisions, agreed with the majority or dissent, the province appealed from, and, of course, the result of the case. What’s really great is that the table can be altered, just like an Excel Spreadsheet. So at the click of a button, one can organize it by citation, or by the opinions of a particular justice. To see a concise summary of any particular case, simply press the button in the far-left column.

We have another interactive table as well, listing the clerks who have served at the SCC dating from 1967. Put together by our Editor-in-Chief, Simon Fodden, there are 713 clerks in all, and, like the above feature, it can be organized by any of its properties. So to see all of the clerks who served under Chief Justice Lamer (all 46 of them), simply click the “Judge” column to have it organized by judge instead of year.

For those doing any SCC related research, we have a selected bibliography of related works. It includes material written by current and former judges of the Court and also material written about the SCC and its judges. It’s catalogued in a RefWorks database, and is fully searchable and exportable. Each bibliographic entry also has links to help find the original work at York University. It was put together by Morris Popowich and Krystal Manitius.

Last, but certainly not least, we are also fortunate enough to have two complete books available in PDF format on our website. The first is entitled Supreme Court of Canada: History of the Institution (I needn’t explain the topic), was written by James Snell and Frederick Vaughan, and first published in 1985. The second is the dissertation of Thaddeus Hwong, now a professor at York University, which focuses on judicial reasoning in the context of Income Tax law.

Hopefully some of our readers will find these resources helpful, and if there are any questions, please post a comment.

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