Adding Citations

Introduction

Citation tags are the most important element of the caselaw.ninja system. These tags tell the user (+ adjudicators/judges) where to find the source of the law you are citing. If you do not add the citations then your work will be meaningless.

The Citation

When citing from CanLII copy the whole line from the cite section of the case, see:

The text that we extracted from above is:

Maclaren v Pregel, 2021 CanLII 57302 (ON SCSM), <https://canlii.ca/t/jgqmj>, retrieved on 2021-08-10

Citation Tags

Using the citation we gathered above we will now format into a ref-tag

<ref name="Maclaren">Maclaren v Pregel, 2021 CanLII 57302 (ON SCSM), <https://canlii.ca/t/jgqmj>, retrieved on 2021-08-10</ref>

Each tag-name (eg..<ref name="Maclaren">) must me unique for the page it is on.

Citation Formatting Rules

Citations must follow the following format ("cite-tags"):

<ref name="tag-name">Case Title, <https://SHORT-LINK-TO-CASE>, retrieved 2021-08-10</ref>

A full example for Maclaren v Pregel, 2021 CanLII 57302 (ON SCSM) is:

<ref name="Maclaren">Maclaren v Pregel, 2021 CanLII 57302 (ON SCSM), <https://canlii.ca/t/jgqmj>, retrieved on 2021-08-10</ref>

Here is where the citation appears on CanLII:

On https://caselaw.pub you will see:

Placing the Cite-Tags

The initial 'cite-tags' are to be placed at the bottom of each case. In order to use the cite-tags you would type:

<ref name="tag-name"/> and place it wherever in the text you are needing a citation.

Using the example above of Maclaren v Pregel, 2021 CanLII 57302 (ON SCSM) the cite-tag would be:

<ref name="Maclaren"/>

Take special note of the / at the end of the smaller cite-tags. Do not forget the use the / in the short cite-tags or you will get a REF-ERROR