Description of the Dictionary
The bisystemic and bilingual Legal Dictionary of Property in Canada offers over 300 articles describing the vocabulary of property for Canada's civil and common law systems.

Each article places the English and French content side-by-side and indicates the legal system(s) to which the vocabulary pertains. Underneath the definition, the "semantic" portion describes the concept's relationship to other concepts within the same legal system. In addition, excerpts taken from judgments that document the term's current use in a legal context are included.
Originality of the project
Stemming from the work of the Department of Justice Canada's Legal Dualism Team, the Legal Dictionary of Property in Canada illustrates the method that the Team has developed in order to complete its analyses. It is meant to capture the specificities of each legal system and to explain the relationships between them. This method is based on the analysis of judicial texts, which are key witnesses to the dynamism and complexity of the Canadian legal framework.

These texts come mainly from decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada but also from the Federal Court of Appeal and the Appeal Courts of Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick, Manitoba and British Columbia. The regular selection and analysis of new texts will help ensure that the Dictionary is always up-to-date. To date, the corpus contains over 20,000 decisions, of which almost 4,000 are bilingual. The use of such a corpus is the foundation of the method adopted for the works of the Legal Dualism Team.

This is the first legal work to use systematically, for lexicographic purposes, a textual database composed of side-by-side bilingual legal texts. This method allows the headwords of the articles to be presented as translation equivalents confirmed by the judicial corpus built to create the Dictionary.
Online version
The online version of the Dictionary adds more than 900 graphs to clarify the semantic relations established between the concepts described. The link to access them is located in the box indicated by the label Graph. These graphs constitute a part of the Dictionary.
Important NoticesSitemapLast modified on: 2010-04-30
Access to the Legal Dictionary of Property in Canada