While Canada suffers from a legal data deficit, some Canadian organizations provide important access; others are seeking to alter the status quo.
For individuals looking to examine judicial decisions or to access a read-only API to access metadata about judicial decisions, CanLII is a fantastic resource.
CanLII provides open-access to court judgments from all Canadian courts and many tribunals. CanLII maintains an API that allows authorized developers to programmatically access metadata from the CanLII collection. To apply for an API key, you must avail CanLII’s feedback form.
Legal Data Innovation Institute (LIDI)
For individuals looking to examine judicial decisions in bulk formats, this resource provides one of only ways to do so.
LIDI takes inspiration from the global free access to law community and many other public interest legal technology innovators and university research labs. LIDI lowers the barriers and expands the circle of innovation in Canadian legal data beyond the small and closed group of legal publishers that currently possess extensive primary law collections.
The Supreme Court of Canada Decisions Project
This database includes information about each reported decision of the Supreme Court of Canada from 1954 onward—including information about appellants and respondents, case history, case dispositions, case issues, and judges’ votes in each case. Professor Ben Alarie and Andrew Green of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law provided Lenczner Slaght with a dataset of every Supreme Court of Canada decision from 1954 through 2013. Lenczner Slaght then validated and cleaned the historical data; they then updated the dataset to the present.
For individuals looking to examine and access what provincial legal data does exist, this resource is a great starting point. Unfortunately, provinces maintain little data on courts that’s amendable to empirical legal research.
For individuals looking to improve their knowledge of the intersection of computer programming, data science, and the law, this resource is fantastic.
Data science for lawyers addresses lectures, scripts, and exercises that deal with different legal data science applications. Its goal isn’t turning you into a programmer. Rather, the goal is helping you learn how to approach and solve big legal questions in a simple programming environment.
Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR)
For individuals looking to examine some datasets that academics have created and some government data, this resource is a good starting point. From brief reviews, this resource unfortunately doesn’t contain much data about Canada’s legal system. But this repository is fairly new.
FRDR does, however, include research datasets originating from researchers affiliated with Canadian institutions. Some data deposited to other repositories across Canada can also be found here.