Legal Research

You may wonder what legal research is and why do it? Legal research is about learning and understanding the law. A judge can only give you what you are entitled to under the law. And they can only make an order you have asked for. By knowing the law, you can develop a stronger, more convincing argument.

For example, if you are entitled to spousal support but haven’t asked for an order of spousal support, the court will not award it to you. If you don’t know the law, you won’t know what order to ask for.

In BC, the law includes two elements:

Legislation: written laws decided by government (e.g. the Family Law Act)
Case law: decisions made judges in other cases

Legislation

A judge will use both legislation and case law to decide your case. You’ll want to use the law to support your position and convince the judge to decide in your favor. This means you should have a basic knowledge of how to search legislation and case law.

Finding the law

First thing’s first, you’ll want to see what the legislation (that’s the written laws such as the Divorce Act) says about your legal rights. The Family Law Act (FLA) is provincial law and can be found on the BC Laws website .The Divorce Act is federal law, which can be found on this Government of Canada website . Each law has a table of contents to help you navigate its content.

Understanding the law

Now that you know how to find specific laws, you need to gain some skill to read the law. Generally speaking, laws are not written in a way that is easy to understand (but this is changing). The older the law is, the more likely it is to be hard to read. Lawyers are trained to read and understand the law. You don’t need to become an expert at reading law, but if you are representing yourself, you need to be able to understand the laws that apply to your case.