If you feel overwhelmed and intimidated each time you are asked to research a legal question involving the civil law of Québec, help is on the way. The Civil Code of Québec in Chart Form, by Denis Le May, provides a graphic, simple access tool for the Code. A series of tables and charts shows the general structure of the Code and the interrelationship between its component parts. Le May provides a broad overview of the subject categories covered by the Code and an explanation of the numbering system he adopted to represent the subdivisions in a uniform fashion. Each separate Book of the Civil Code has its own chapter. Each chapter contains the following: a chart giving an overall pictorial representation of the contents of that Book; a table of contents; a summary (including the text of important articles, definitions and explanatory notes); individual charts for subdivisions; and an index. The organizational structure of the book provides general finding tools and easy access to researchers in a variety of different situations: if she doesn't know where a concept is located (use the general index); if he knows the article number but wants to see the corresponding segment (use the articles/charts concordance table); if she knows in which Book the concept is located, but not the specific article (use the table of contents for that particular Book); or if he wants to quickly ascertain whether or not there is a chart which corresponds to the concept being researched (use the list of charts or the alphabetical index).

Denis Le May is the former law librarian at Université Laval, and the author of many books and articles. He has written a definitive French treatise on legal research, as well as the chapter on Quebec research in Douglass T. MacEllvan’s Legal Research Handbook. He is the author of The Civil Code of Québec in Chart Form which was published by Irwin Law in 2006 which is based on his Le code civil du Québec en tableaux synoptiques, (Wilson & Lafleur,1992). He is past president of Canadian Association of Law Libraries/Association Canadienne des bibliotheques de droit.

Denis Le May's profile page