Neutral citation
A court-assigned, publisher-independent case citation in the form year, court code, and decision number, e.g. 2016 SCC 27.
A neutral citation is a citation assigned by the court itself when a decision is released, rather than by a commercial publisher. It follows the pattern year, court identifier, and sequential decision number: for example, R. v. Jordan, 2016 SCC 27 identifies the 27th decision released by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2016.
Canadian courts adopted neutral citation in the early 2000s, and it is now the preferred first citation under the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (the McGill Guide). Because it does not depend on any print reporter, a neutral citation works across every database and free service such as CanLII. Decisions issued before neutral citation was adopted are still cited to printed reporters — for example R. v. Stinchcombe, [1991] 3 S.C.R. 326.