Case Law Reporting in Canada

The current chapter of my dissertation has to do with using mainstream newspaper archives to survey the comprehensiveness of case law reporting in Canadian legal history, using blasphemy prosecutions as a test sample. Naturally, this led me to research all sorts of interesting digressions, and today I read Case Law Reporting in Canada by Shirley Lounder, a report published in 1982 by the now-defunct Canadian Law Information Council. It's a really interesting empirical study of how cases were reported and digested in the pre-Internet days. The report is hard to find now (I managed to get a copy through interlibrary loan), but contains some studies that were eye-opening to me, at least.

For example, one study examines the comprehensiveness and accuracy of case law reports and notes a surprising number of instances where the printed reporters simply get things wrong: they misspell party names, put the wrong level of the court, are vague about the date the decision was decided, digest or report a single case multiple times with different and confusing headnotes, etc. In other words, it's easy to assume that case law reporters are pristine incarnations of "the law", when in fact they are very much examples of human endeavours and human fallibility. The fact that most legal researchers, myself included, do our legal research using online databases doesn't lessen the risk of coming across erroneously-reported cases, because the databases themselves were originally formed by converting print cases into digital forms. If a 1972 case says it was decided by the B.C. Court of Appeal when, in fact, it was decided by the B.C. Superior Court, who is going to know differently fifteen or forty years later?