Legal Research

More From the McGill Guide

By Shaunna Mireau

I was following links from tweets yesterday and came across an old, if May 2010 meets that criteria, Rex Gradeless post about citing podcasts in legal documents and the new Bluebook (the US equivalent to the McGill Guide). Rex Gradeless is one of the social media savvy (former) law students that we talk about.

There has been a lot of traffic on Slaw regarding podcasts lately, and as you can read, plenty of great offers via that medium.

I just HAD to check out my new McGill guide to see if we had an equivalent! I am happy to report that the answer was yes. Podcast is in the index with a reference to page 135 (the E for English and the F for French being neutral in the index references). The Example reported is as follows:

“Defamation in the Internet Age” (1 June 2008) (podcast), online: Osler

Personally, I would rather see a direct and persistent URL represented in a reference, like http://www.osler.com/NewsResources/Details.aspx?id=1686 instead of the more general URL, but I am sure there is a great reason to only show the root URL for a source.

The reference to podcasts in the directions in the McGill guide suggest that if possible, the name of the speaker instead of the author should be provided.

Podcasts are like any other internet site according to the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, 7th edition. Sure, except you can listen to them on a long drive from Halifax to TO.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on September 09, 2010 (boomark / email).