ADMS 3420: Employment Law (Doorey)
Handout 3
How to Read a
Legal Citation and Decision
We will read cases from a large variety of courts and
tribunals. There are differences
in the ways the decisions are reported and presented, but there is a common theme
in the formatting. (See also
the textbook, p. 20)
Consider first the Bhadauria decision from Week 2.
It looks like this:
Seneca College of
Applied Arts and Technology v. Bhadauria
[1981] 2 S.C.R.
181 (S.C.C.)
Present: Laskin
C.J. and Dickson, Beetz, Estey, McIntyre,
Chouinard and
Lamer JJ.
The first line is the name of the case. Seneca College is the party that is bringing the case
forward. If the case is at the
first level of court, the party named first is called the Plaintiff, while the other party is the Defendant.
When the decision is an appeal case, challenging a lower
court’s decision, the first party listed is called the Appellant (the party that is appealing the earlier decision),
and the other party is called the Respondent (the party responding to the appeal). So in this case, which is an
appeal, Seneca is the appellant, and Bhadauria is the respondent.
I know it’s an appeal because the court is the Supreme Court
of Canada, and the SCC only hears
appeals. The next line tells
us where to find the published version of the decision in a library.
[1981] Year
the case decided
2 S.C.R. 181 The
decision can be found in volume 2, of the legal case reporter book
called the Supreme Court Reports (SCR), on page 181
(SCC) The
name of the court will usually appear in brackets at the end of the
citation in abbreviation form
Following that is the names of the Supreme Court judges who
decided the case. There were 7 of
them hearing this case. Only
the Supreme Court has this many judges on one case. The Court of Appeal usually has three judges on a case,
while lower courts will only have one judge deciding.