I once did a short study of academic citation in the SCC over a 6-year period: V

Black & N Richter, "Did She Mention my Name?: Judicial Citation of Academic

Authority by the Supreme Court of Canada, 1985-1990" (1993) 16 Dalhousie Law

Journal 377.  Members of this discussion group may be interested to learn that

the most frequently cited writer in the torts field was John Fleming -- 12

cites, 11 to Fleming on Torts and one to an article.

On the related point of judicial failure to acknowledge sources, I have

sometimes been surprised to see judges lift lengthy verbatim passages from

appellate facta, entirely without attribution.  This doesn't just occur in the

portions of judicial reasons where judges are reciting the facts; I have seen

it in the portions that constitute the reasoning.  If my students did this in

work they were submitting for credit there would be severe academic

consequences.

I suppose that this usually occurs with the winning factum, so the lawyers

involved are unlikely to complain.  Still, if these things are just matters of

convention it seems fair to say that the convention in Canada is as follows:

when, in the writing of their reasons for judgment, judges replicate verbatim

passages from the parties' pleadings, the practices of using quotation marks

and indicating the source of the original are entirely optional.

vb