Friday Tip – Need an Online Textbook? Try the CED!

March 27, 2020

By Ken Fox, Research Librarian

In essence, the Canadian Encyclopedia Digest Online is a comprehensive legal textbook. I can’t guarantee that it has the same scope as that classic work in a given practice area that you know and rely on. But if you are needing an online legal text, and don’t have access to an ebook edition, then in these times of social distancing I would highly recommend you peruse the CED online before requesting a print edition from your local law library.

There are 220 titles total, about 50 of which apply specifically to other provinces. Of the latter, most are Ontario editions, for which there is a corresponding “Western” edition. So, the number of titles that apply to Saskatchewan is about 170, about 50 of which focus on the four Western provinces, and the remainder covering the west plus Ontario.

If you are a Saskatchewan lawyer, you can access the CED by logging in to the Member Resource Section, then scrolling down to the WestlawNext Canada heading and locate the “Canadian Encyclopedic Digest” heading, third from the bottom. Alternatively, you can go to the WestlawNext Canada “Home” page and locate the CED in the list of “Commentary.”

The CED online can be searched or browsed. Let’s try clicking on the Admin law title –

If you click on “Currency,” you get a note letting you know that the Saskatchewan content has been updated to the April 12, 2019 edition of the Sask Gazette (among similar notes applying to other provinces), and a note attributing the contents to David Phillip Jones, Anne S. de Villars & Dawn M. Knowles. Do those names sound familiar to any of you? Yes, these are the same folks who wrote the popular Principles of Administrative Law, 6^th edition published by Carswell in 2014. Now I don’t have the book in front of me, but if I did, I wouldn’t at all be surprised to learn that the CED text contains a lot of the same material, would you? So, with the CED, in this case, you are getting a more up-to-date version of the book you were hoping to borrow!

I’m going to go ahead and assume that you know how to browse a table of contents for relevant headings. But I will take a bit more space and demonstrate a quick search. Let’s say I am looking for commentary on the Pushpanathan Factor (OK, I confess this is a cheat – I didn’t have a search scenario at the ready so I browsed the TOC then just pulled an easy-to-search heading).

Why the “adv:”? Well, in Westlaw, the adv, or “advanced” tag lets the search engine know that you want to use Connectors and Expanders. For a list of connectors and expanders, click on the “advanced” button just to the right of the orange “Search” button. For most searches, I highly recommend using connectors and expanders, rather than a “natural language” search – although in this case it makes no difference in the results because the search has only one word.

Some articles appear in the main pane, but as always in Westlaw, the global view of the results appears in the left-hand pane, which is where our attention should focus initially. There are 24 total results, which are broken down by region and subject:

Some articles appear in the main pane, but as always in Westlaw, the global view of the results appears in the left-hand pane, which is where our attention should focus initially. There are 24 total results, which are broken down by region and subject:

In this case, there is little need to apply filters, as 23 of the 24 results apply to Western Canada (one is apparently Ontario-only), and 18 of the 24 have administrative law as a subject. So, applying both filters eliminates only six results, leaving us with 18.

Pictured are the first four articles, sorted by relevance. Using the “sort by” drop-down at the top, you can change the sort to “table of contents” – meaning the results will appear in the order they do in the CED. For most purposes, I prefer the relevance sort, where an algorithm pushes articles that use the search term more frequently and more prominently (in title, headings) to the top of the list.

Note that the first few articles are all related around a common “Pushpanathan Factors” heading – our search is probably complete (this should not be a surprise since I loaded the deck by searching for a term I knew to be in the TOC!).

This article, not uncommon in the CED, only has a single paragraph, with footnote below including case citations. Some articles are quite lengthy, but most are only a few paragraphs. Note that the header includes references to the Canadian Abridgement so you can find additional case law on this point.

Using the command bar immediately above the article, you can return to the main list of results, advance to the next result, or advance within the document (or the following document) to the next instance of the search term, wherever it may be.

Further to the right on the command bar, you can advance to the next paragraph in the CED, open a clickable table of contents, search within the document (I prefer CTRL-F), change the display, or select a download option:

The right-hand pane has “content related to these legal topics” from the Canadian Abridgment. Note that the sole reference is the same title as appears in the header info. However, the duplication is not inevitable – it happened here only because my search term is both unique and a prominent legal concept. But these results are drawn from different sources. The Abridgment links in the header are set up by the Abridgment editing staff, relating the two products by mapping their classifications. The results on the right are drawing from your search terms. So often you will get multiple suggestions in the right pane, none of which may match the link in the header.

So, the CED is in the first instance, a comprehensive legal textbook. But it is also a quick way to advance to case law authorities on point, through footnotes, Abridgment mapping, and Abridgment headings suggested by your search terms.

Questions? Contact the library any time.