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The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII; French: Institut canadien d'information juridique) is a non-profit organization created and funded by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada in 2001 on behalf of its 14 member societies. CanLII is a member of the Free Access to Law Movement, which includes the primary stakeholders involved in free, open publication of law throughout the world.[1]
| Type | Non-profit |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Legal education |
Parent organization | Federation of Law Societies of Canada |
| Website | www |
CanLII offers free public access to over 2.4 million documents[2] across more than 300 case law and legislative databases.[3] The official websites of provincial governments, which provide access to primary legislative documents, are linked to CANLII online.[4] The CANLII database is one of the most comprehensive collections of Canadian federal, provincial and territorial legislation.[5] It is used by lawyers, legal professionals and the general public, with usage averaging over 30,000 visits per day.[6] The case law database is reportedly growing at a rate of approximately 120,000 new cases each year, 20% of which are historic cases which are included to enrich existing databases.[7]
In April 2014, CanLII launched CanLII Connects, a legal community sourced publication and discussion platform for case law summaries and commentaries.[8][9]
In March 2018, CanLII launched a commentary program including law reviews, e-books, articles, public legal education materials, and reports.[10]
In June 2020, CanLII started actively promoting the CanLII guest writer program.[11] As of February 2024[update], CanLII is piloting the use of a large language model to generate artificial intelligence case summaries.[12]
Other websites will often use CanLII as their primary source when referring to Canadian case law,[13] and as of the 10th Edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, is the designated preferred citation, in the absence of official court-issued neutral citations.[14][15]
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