Thanks to the great initiative of the Osgoode Hall School Chief Librarian, Louis Mirando, all the final reports of the former Ontario Law Reform Commission, as well as some consultation papers, collections of papers and other related documents, are now available on-line. They are currently on the Internet Library Archive, accessible through the Osgoode Hall Law School Library site, as well as directly, but will eventually be "housed" elsewhere.
The OLRC was the first "modern" law commission, with "permanent" resources and a general law reform mandate, created in 1964. From then until 1996 when its funding was ended as part of the "commonsense revolution", it made significant contributions to the development of law in Ontario and elsewhere.
At the Law Commission of Ontario, we often receive requests for copies of the OLRC reports which are highly regarded. We have been unable to provide them, but now they will be easily available to law reformers and other researchers across the world.They are searchable, and are available in a variety of formats, as well as (in most cases) English and French.
I picked a document at random. It turned out to be a collection of papers from 1991, on Appointing Judges: Philosophy, Politics and Practice, not the usual OLRC publication. It will surprise no one that most of the issues addressed in this collection are still germane twenty years later, as we continue to struggle with the judicial appointment process. Given the current composition of the Supreme Court of Canada, the one issue that may seem to have been resolved is "gender representation", although this is not necessarily the case for the provincial superior courts. Other reports may have nostalgia value (sometimes because they resulted in changes to the law), while others remain valid today. As Louis Mirando pointed out to me, the number of people accessing the reports even within the first few days they were available far surpassed the number who had accessed hard copies from the library.
We are pleased to have been associated with this project. Thanks to Louis Mirando and Tim Knight, the OHLS Library "point man" for this project, to John McCamus, the former Chair of the OLRC, who was finally able to move his complete set of the OLRC reports from his home to us in preparation for their digitilization, to the Ministry of the Attorney General who provided copyright permission and to Janice Williams, the LCO Executive Assistant who acted as our liaison with the Library.
The digitilization of the OLRC reports has not only made an important historical contribution to the development of law in Ontario, but a significant contemporary one in making the excellent work completed for the reports available to all those working in similar areas of law.
