CanCourts is a simple project to push some of the RSS feeds from the Canadian Legal Information Institute – CanLII – to Twitter. CanLII helpfully provides RSS feeds for recently added judgments for all of the courts and tribunals the decisions of which it publishes. Some legal workers do not read RSS feeds but do use Twitter, finding it a helpful way to receive leads to relevant information quickly. The CanCourts project, then, extends the functionality of some of CanLII's feeds.

I have chosen to begin with notices of new Supreme Court decisions and new court of appeal judgments — at the outset, those from British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. Each of these has been given its own Twitter account to which you may subscribe. You will find links to these in the menu to your right.

I'll be adding notices for the courts of appeal for other provinces in due course.

Be aware that there is a delay of a day or two between the time a court of appeal releases a judgment and the time that it appears on CanLII. So if you want absolutely up-to-the-minute notification, you will have to check the web pages for the relevant courts -- which do not, or do not all, provide RSS feeds announcing their released judgments. Supreme Court judgments, however, are processed by CanLII with speed and are available within minutes of their release; the CanCourtsSCC Twitter feed, then, will be up-to-the-minute.

Simon Fodden
simon at fodden dot com