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Legal Research Video Tutorials: Secondary Sources Research

Instructional video collection on legal research topics

Introduction to Secondary sources

Secondary sources in legal research refers to those that do not have any binding authorities in solving legal problems. In Canada, legislation and case law can have binding authorities, therefore, they are referred to as primary sources. Anything other than the primary sources are secondary sources. The most commonly used secondary sources in Canadian legal research include but are not limited to:

  • books 
  • scholarly journal articles,
  • legal encyclopedias,
  • law dictionaries,
  • newspaper and magazine articles.

On this page, you will find instructions on how to research each of these secondary sources.