What You May Quote From a Research Report

Every research report is built the same way: an answer written in ordinary prose, with small numbered markers through it, and a list of numbered authorities underneath. Each marker points at the authority the sentence rests on, and the numbering runs from one upward in the order the authorities first appear.

The list is not a bibliography. Nothing is in it unless the answer actually used it, so a report citing six authorities is a report that used six. That makes the list short and worth reading in full, which is the intention.

Two kinds of authority, and they are not interchangeable

The list holds two kinds of source, and the difference between them is the single most important thing to understand before relying on a report.

A statute source is extracted text from the statute itself. It is the provision, as published. You can read it, rely on the words, and quote it.

A case source is different. It is a written summary of a judgment, prepared for the database. It sets out what the case was, what was in issue and how it was disposed of, and it is accurate as a description. It is not the court's own language, and nothing in it should be presented to a court as though it were. A sentence taken from a summary and dropped into a filing inside quotation marks is a quotation of us, attributed to a judge.

So the rule is narrow and easy to hold: quote the statute, use the case. When a proposition turns on the exact words a judge used, the summary has told you which judgment to open, and opening it is the next step rather than an optional one.

What a citation gives you

Clicking a marker or an authority in the list opens a brief for that source rather than sending you away from the report.

For a judgment the brief carries the case as it is filed: the court, the case number, the date, the area of law and how it was disposed of, with the summary itself and the statutes the judgment cited. It also carries a link to the judgment as the court published it, which is where you go for the language.

For a statute the brief answers a narrower question, which is which provision this is. It names the sections found on the page, the jurisdiction, the year and whether the statute has been repealed or superseded, and then it hands you to the statute reader at the right page. It deliberately does not reprint the whole provision inside the popup, because the reader is where you can search the text, move between sections and see the provision in its place.

The repeal strip is a claim, and its absence is not

Where a statute source has been repealed or repealed in part, the brief says so and names the repealing statute. Where it has probably been overtaken, it says that more softly and avoids the word repealed.

Where it says nothing at all, that means nothing has been recorded either way. It is not a statement that the provision is current. Absence of a repeal note is absence of evidence, and on a question where currency actually matters the check belongs with the provincial code portal or the gazette, not with the silence.

What the report keeps

A report holds the authorities as they stood on the day it was written, not a pointer to be resolved later. Corpora are rebuilt, summaries are revised and records are occasionally withdrawn, and a report that stored only identifiers could quietly show you something other than what you read. Reopening a report six months from now shows the same numbered list, in the same words, as the day you relied on it.

That is useful when a matter comes back and you need to know what the position looked like when the advice was given. It is also the reason a report is worth keeping rather than re-running.

Before it goes into a filing

Three things, in order. Read the statute source in the reader rather than in the popup, because the provision in its place will occasionally read differently from the provision on its own. Open any judgment whose exact reasoning you intend to rely on, since the summary got you to it and cannot stand in for it. And check currency independently for any provision where being a year out of date would change the advice.

The report is a fast and well evidenced starting point. What it is not, and does not claim to be, is the last thing you read before you sign.