The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII; ) is a non-profit organization created and funded by the
Federation of Law Societies of Canada in 2001 on behalf of its 14 member societies. CanLII is a member of the
Free Access to Law Movement
The Free Access to Law Movement (FALM) is the international organization devoted to providing free online access to legal information such as case law, legislation, treaties, law reform proposals and legal scholarship. The movement began in 1992 ...
, which includes the primary stakeholders involved in free, open publication of law throughout the world.
Background
CanLII offers free public access to over 2.4 million documents across more than 300 case law and legislative databases. The official websites of provincial governments, which provide access to primary legislative documents, are linked to CANLII online. The CANLII database is one of the most comprehensive collections of Canadian federal, provincial and territorial legislation. It is used by lawyers, legal professionals and the general public, with usage averaging over 30,000 visits per day. The case law database is reportedly growing at a rate of approximately 120,000 new cases each year, 20% of which are historic cases which are included to enrich existing databases.
History
In April 2014, CanLII launched CanLII Connects, a legal community sourced publication and discussion platform for case law summaries and commentaries.
In March 2018, CanLII launched a commentary program including law reviews, e-books, articles, public legal education materials, and reports.
In June 2020, CanLII started actively promoting the CanLII guest writer program. , CanLII is piloting the use of a
large language model
A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially language generation.
The largest and most capable LLMs are g ...
to generate
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...
case summaries.
Other websites will often use CanLII as their primary source when referring to Canadian case law,
and as of the 10th Edition of the
Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, is the designated preferred
citation
A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose o ...
, in the absence of official court-issued
neutral citations.
In November 2024, CanLII filed a copyright lawsuit against an AI company calle
Caseway
References
External links
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{{Authority control
Legal organizations based in Canada
Legal education in Canada
Free Access to Law Movement
Case law databases