Teresa Scassa - Blog

“Social Networking, Privacy and Civil Litigation: Recent Developments in Canadian Law”, forthcoming in (2011) 7:7 Can. Privacy L. Rev.

"Violence Against Women in Law Schools", (1992), 30 Alberta L.R. 809

"Sentencing Intimate Femicide:  A Comment on R. v. Doyle", (1993) 41 Dalhousie L.J. 270

"Language of Judgment and the Supreme Court of Canada", (1994) 43 U.N.B.L.J. 169

"Social Welfare and Section 7 of the Charter: Conrad v. The Municipality of the County of Halifax", (1994) 17 Dalhousie Law Journal 187

"Language Standards, Ethnicity and Discrimination", (1994) 26 Canadian Ethnic Studies  103-121

"Language, Culture and the Courts:  Bilingual Education in the United States", (1996) 26 Canadian Review of American Studies 31.

"National Identity, Ethnic Surnames and the State", (1996) 11 Canadian Journal of Law and Society 167.

"Text and Context: Making Sense of Canada's New Personal Information Protection Legislation", (2000-2001) 32 Ottawa Law Review 1-34

"The Best Things in Law are Free:  Towards Quality Free Public Access to Primary Legal Materials in Canada", (2000) 23 Dalhousie Law Journal 301-336

This paper examines the move, in the 1990s in Canada, towards making primary legal materials freely available to the public over the internet.   The paper begins by assessing the situation in Canada at the time of writing, and the need for a centralized and harmonized electronic portal for primary legal materials.  I consider initiatives in other jurisdictions aimed at providing comprehensive free public access, and explore the rationales for developing and providing such access.  I explore some of the implications and questions raised by the provision of publicly accessible primary legal materials.  These include the concepts of  “public” and “access”, concerns about information monopolies, the role of lawyers as "infomediaries" and the normative implications of "freeing" the law.