A table of authorities is not a bibliography
A table of authorities lists the legal sources a document relies on, grouped by kind, with the places in the document where each source is used. Its purpose is navigational: a judge or reader who wants to know where you dealt with a particular case should find the answer in seconds.
A bibliography and a table of authorities can have different inclusion, grouping and reference requirements. Follow the instructions for your document. Submitting one in place of the other without checking those instructions is a substantive error, not a formatting preference.
Which one you need, how the categories are named and ordered, whether page or paragraph references are required, and how entries are styled are all controlled by the rules applying to your document: the court's practice direction, the moot problem and its organizers, the journal's submission guidelines, or your professor's instructions. Those rules override anything this page shows you.
What the grouping actually does
| Step | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Category assignment | Each row belongs to the category you selected from the dropdown. The tool never infers a category from the text of a citation. |
| Category order | Groups are emitted in a fixed order: cases, legislation, secondary sources, international materials, then other. This order does not change and is not configurable. |
| Sorting | Within each group, entries are sorted by the citation text using locale-aware en-CA collation, so accented characters and case differences sort the way Canadian English expects rather than by raw character codes. |
| Duplicate flagging | Within the same category, duplicates are detected after ignoring case and normalizing whitespace. Punctuation or pinpoint differences can still prevent a match. Rows are flagged, never automatically merged or removed; you decide what to do. |
| Verbatim preservation | Citation text, page and paragraph references, short labels and jurisdiction notes are carried through exactly as typed, including spacing and punctuation. |
Within the same category, duplicates are detected after ignoring case and normalizing whitespace, so capitalization and spacing differences alone will not stop a match. Punctuation or pinpoint differences can still prevent a match: two entries for the same authority that differ by a comma or a page reference are treated as separate strings. Export preserves your wording and punctuation but normalizes spacing.
A four-entry table
Fictional teaching example — not legal authority.
Invented entries across two categories, including a flagged duplicate
| Category | Citation as entered | Cited at | Tool behaviour |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cases | Aster v Borealis, 2099 FICT 1 | 5, 12 | Sorts first in the cases group under en-CA collation |
| Cases | Aster v Borealis, 2099 FICT 1 | 5, 12 | Flagged as an exact duplicate of the row above; left in place for you to remove |
| Cases | Zephyr v Meadow, 2099 FICT 42 | 18 | Sorts after Aster within the same group |
| Legislation | Fictional Contracts Act (invented for this example), s 4 | 3, 5 | Placed in the legislation group, which is emitted after all cases |
A fifth entry, an invented secondary source, would follow in its own group after legislation. None of these entries reflects a real authority, and the layout above is a teaching illustration, not an official court form or any institution's prescribed table format.
Supported and unsupported
| Supported | Not supported |
|---|---|
| Adding, editing, reordering and deleting rows by hand | Parsing a factum, essay or uploaded document to extract citations |
| Assigning a category to each row yourself | Detecting the category, jurisdiction or court from the citation text |
| Grouping in fixed category order with en-CA sorting inside each group | Validating, correcting, italicizing or reformatting any citation |
| Flagging case- and whitespace-insensitive duplicates within one category | Ignoring punctuation or pinpoint differences, or automatically merging near-identical entries |
| Copying the plain-text export or printing the list | Verifying that an authority exists, is current, or has not been overturned |
| Starting over with Reset, behind a confirmation prompt | Generating an official court form, or saving work between sessions |
Where to go next
- Verify each authority against its source and note it up before it enters the table, because a tidy table of stale authorities is still stale.
- Screen individual citations in the Citation Checker, and rebuild incomplete ones in the Canadian Legal Citation Builder.
- Re-read the practice direction, moot rules or submission guidelines that govern your document, then adjust category names, ordering and styling in your word processor.
Privacy, academic integrity and independence
Privacy on this page. Rows are grouped and sorted in your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded, placed in the page URL, or included in analytics or logs. Entries are held in page memory only: reloading the page or confirming Reset discards them, and nothing is saved between sessions. Copying the export or printing the page exposes that content to your own device's clipboard, printer and print-to-file destination. Do not enter confidential, sealed or publication-banned material.
Academic integrity. Assembling a list is not research. You remain responsible for having read each authority, for its currency, and for the accuracy of every page reference you record here.
Independence. LegalCalc Ontario is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any court, tribunal, moot organizer, law school, journal or publisher, including McGill University, the McGill Law Journal and Thomson Reuters or Carswell. Nothing here is an official form, and no proprietary citation-guide content is reproduced.