Legal systems of Canada

[Pierrot Péladeau]

Hi Karl,

The fact that 12 provincial and territorial jurisdiction is of Common Law tradition, one province of Roman-Germanic legal tradition and the federal drawing from a mix of both has not that much significance on open data and access.

The main source of impact comes simply by the fact that Canada in not an single jurisdictional space, but a country with 13 constituent States plus one federal one. Thus, possible different, sometimes overlapping, sometimes incompatible, norms. Thus, a campaign to be made in 14 jurisdictions (this having both advantages and disadvantages).

The only effect of having two different traditions relates to jurisdictional weight of jurisprudence and it is not that a strong one. A case solved essentially by application of some Common Law principle or precedent (they are not that numerous since statutes law now have a major weight in today's legal system) is likely to act as a precedent readily available across all Common Law jurisdictions. But that is not to say that it could not be used as a precedent in Quebec. Indeed, courts now look at precedents from all over the world when lawyers provide them.

Thus the issue becomes more access to legal sources of info. The larger impact in my view comes from the linguistic abilities of jurists in particular and citizens at large. Those who are bilingual, or better multilingual, are more apt to draw from all available Canadian as well as available foreign Common Law and Roman-Germanic tradition countries' legal texts, jurisprudence, doctrine and related literature than unlingual ones.

Hope this answers.

Pierrot
__________________________________________________________________
Pierrot Péladeau
Social assessment of information system
Guest Researcher at Communautique
Member of the Ethics and Ageing Lab at CRIUGM
Associate Researcher at CEFRIO

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Le 2011-01-13 13:38, [hidden email] a écrit :

Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2011 13:26:35 -0500
From: Karl Dubost [hidden email]
To: civicaccess discuss [hidden email]
Subject: [CivicAccess-discuss] Legal systems of Canada
Message-ID: [hidden email]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Hi,

not being Canadian native, I still struggle with some facts. The Canadian provinces but Quebec seem to have adopted the british legal system and Quebec the Code Napol?on. I was wondering if this had any impact on the way we foresee open data and access to resources.

IANAL.

-- 
Karl Dubost
Montr?al, QC, Canada
http://www.la-grange.net/karl/