From: John Kleefeld
<john.kleefeld@unb.ca>
Sent: Thursday 21 November 2024
15:52
To: John Kleefeld; Jason W
Neyers; obligations
Subject: Pre-1970 SCC Decisions on
the Internet Archive (1/x)
Dear colleagues:
On November 14, Barbara Legate circulated an article
about the Supreme Court of Canada's decision to pull its pre-1970 decisions
from its website: Jessica Mach, "SCC decisions without both English and French
translations no longer available on court website" (12 November 2024) Canadian
Lawyer, online here.
This, the article tells us, was in response to a lawsuit by Droits
collectifs Québec to compel the Court's registrar to provide English and French
translations of those decisions, something it has said it is not required to
do.
The 1970 date, as most of you know, reflects the
coming into force of Canada's Official Languages Act, under which
federal communications and services must be in both official languages, English
and French. Commentary on the SCC's rationale and stance, some of which can be
found here
(in French) and here
(in English), circulated on this listserv in October and was critical of the
SCC's reaction. The article circulated by Barbara suggests that the SCC's
approach has softened and that it will start to translate "historically and
jurisprudentially significant decisions published before 1970 and offer both
French and English versions of the decisions on its website." That may be so,
although it will raise some interesting questions about who decides what is
"significant" and how that decision is made.
My concern here, though, is that the removal of
pre-1970 decisions, apart from being unlikely to end the lawsuit, creates an
access-to-legal-information problem that can only partially be filled by recourse
to other online databases, which is what the Court suggests as the solution.
See Cristin Schmitz, "Removal of untranslated English decisions on website
won't end novel lawsuit against SCC: plaintiff" (14 November 2024) Law360,
online here. I view the decision as most unfortunate, although it has one bright aspect: it
may enhance the profile of the Internet Archive. Through its Wayback Machine,
the IA has been doing yeoman service in preserving the Internet by archiving
web pages through its own web crawler and giving people the ability to create
archives of web pages themselves. In the next email, I will explain how this
works and show how you can still access the pre-1970 decisions from the Court's
website.
Yours truly,
|
JOHN C. KLEEFELD Professor,
Faculty of Law University
of New Brunswick 506.453.4701 |