Historical Legal Sources

The following resources might be helpful if you're doing historical legal research. For more resources, visit our Legal History research guide.

Resources that are freely available (websites members of the public can use) are marked with an asterisk (*).

• Supreme Court of Canada Judgments* (via Lexum) (1877–present)
• Canada Supreme Court Reports (1876–2019) (via HeinOnline)
• Revised Statutes of Canada (all RSCs from 1886–1985) (via HeinOnline)
• Acts of the Parliament of Canada (Annual Statutes) (1792–2020) (via HeinOnline)
• Canadian Parliamentary Historical Resources* (includes all debates, journals, and committee documentation of the Senate and the House of Commons from 1867 until coverage at parl.ca* begins. Historical sessional papers are also available from 1867–1901)
• Canadiana Online* (includes historical Canadian legislation, case law, government documents, and texts)
• Canada Gazettes* (1841–1997)
• Orders in Council* (1867–1924)
• Canadian Government Publications Portal* (via Archive.org) (provides more than 20,000 Canadian Government publications)
• Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada* (1901–1925) (via University of Toronto and Archive.org)
• LLMC-Digital (full-text historical materials from common law countries, including cases and legislation)
• Internet Archive* (includes historical legislation, case law, and texts from Canada and other countries)
• Fisheries and Pollution Reports (FPR)* (a five-volume series of law reports published from 1980–1992 by Environment Canada. Digitized by the Bora Laskin and Osgoode Hall Law Libraries)
• Historic Ontario Statutes* (annual statutes from 1970–1999; revised statutes from 1914–1990)
• Nova Scotia House of Assembly Journals* (1867–2001)