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• Introduction
  
  
• 1.1 What is Jurisprudence
  
  
• 1.2 How is Case Law Compiled
  
  
• 1.3 Finding Case Law
  
  
• 1.4 Secondary Sources
  
  
• 1.5 Case Law Indexes
  
  
• 1.6 Case Digests
  
  
• 1.7 Commercial and Legal Information Institute Databases
  
  
• 1.8 The Canadian Abridgement
  
  
• 1.9 What Can I Find by Using the Canadian Abridgment?
  
  
• 1.10 Updating and Noting-Up Cases
  
  
• 1.11 Updating and Noting-Up Using the Canadian Abridgment
  
  
• 1.12 Noting-Up Electronically
  
  
• 1.13 Noting-Up Electronically with QuickCITE
  
  
• 1.14 Noting-Up Electronically with KeyCite Canada
  
  
• Review and Conclusion
  
  

Case Law and the Canadian Abridgement – Case Digests

Reading summaries or digests of cases is another effective strategy for locating case law.
A number of publications provide summaries or digests of Canadian cases, including:

• All Canada Weekly Summaries;
• Lawyers' Weekly; and,
• Canadian Abridgment.

See fig 1.1 for an example, taken from the Canadian Abridgment.

Fig 1.1 Example of a case digest

A digest or summary of a case allows you to quickly determine whether reading the case in full will be useful or not. At the end of the summary, you will always find the citation to the full text, which you can then retrieve either online or in paper.