The Look of Law Is in Your Eyes: Thirty Years of Federal Legislation Online

On 5 November 2025 the Department of Justice updated the Justice Laws website to, “enhance usability, accessibility, and consistency across government platforms.” per the Canada.ca redesign. However, Justice Laws has been adapting to the evolving digital landscape for over three decades, sometimes with incremental changes and sometimes in noticeable design leaps like this latest iteration. Looking back at its earliest versions reveals how far the provision of electronic federal law has come. This blog post will review the visual history of the website in an effort to show how design choices have always communicated ideas about access to law and the value of the structure and organisation of legislation. By tracing the site from its earliest archived versions over the following thirty years, we can see how each redesign captured a distinct moment of the development of digital legal information in tandem with early web design in Canada.

The Wayback Machine began archiving websites in 1996, therefore, this is the year our journey begins. It seems appropriate because the Reproduction of Federal Law Order (the “Order”) was published in late 1996 and opened the door to Canada’s Free Access to Law (FAL) landscape. It allowed anyone to reproduce federal statutes (and judicial decisions) for free, provided the material was accurate and not presented as official. The move followed steady advocacy from within government and academia to make law accessible online, and it also carried a cultural component: Canada wanted its own legal materials visible on a web that was rapidly filling with American content. So, while we can speculate with decent accuracy that federal legislation was available online prior to 1996, the fact that the first archived version is from the year of the Order marks a clear transition point for access to Canadian legal information online. The Order is listed at the top of the page, highlighting its importance.

The primary materials included the Constitutional Laws of Canada, a selection of consolidated statutes and regulations, the annual statutes of 1995–1996, selected annotated statutes, and the Table of Public Statutes. The earliest digital provision of federal legislation closely resembled the print publication process it was replacing. Statutes and regulations were posted online as discrete pages or plain text files, much like scanned or transcribed versions of bound volumes, with little attention to navigation or discoverability. These early pages were largely static, offering no built-in search tools. They required users to have a fairly precise idea of what they were looking for upon accessing the site. Locating and navigating legislation depended on prior familiarity with legislative structure, citation conventions, and titles, just much as it did in print. At this stage, putting legislation online was less about rethinking how law could be accessed digitally and more about reproducing existing publication practices in a new medium.

In 1998, a minor visual change to a grey background appears. This was common due to cathode ray tubes (CRT) technology causing screens to burn out, making darker screens a trendy necessity. Three notable accessibility changes occur. Consolidations are delayed by five-month, which was likely expedient for the time. Quick Links to common sources were added (and are still present today as “frequently accessed”). Finally, annotated statutes appeared on the site—a feature that has since become entirely the domain of commercial publishers.

Of digital significance, stable URLs were established and Folio VIEWS, a DOS based indexing tool for searching infobases, was promoted as the de facto standard for electronic legal publishing. Infobases were curated collections of documents that allowed for full text searching at a time before search functions were built directly into websites. Users were encouraged to search legislation in Folio VIEWS, (“Downloadable versions of most of the Statutes and Regulations are now available on this site, but they are not easy to search.” [emphasis added]) and then copy the relevant statute from its plain text version on the site. The online collection was neither official nor comprehensive, and the site provided a list of Acts and Regulations that were not yet included.

By 2000 several visual and functional changes appear. The white background returns and the Department of Justice selects an apolitical green as the featured colour (no offense intended to the Green Party). New additions include explanatory text and two menus for navigation: an index for low-level sites within the Department of Justice on the left and a header menu for top-level navigation. The explanatory text necessitated vertical scrolling, but per the UX trends of the day, the most important information was “above the fold” on the top half of the page. The menus were indicative of the time as well, as Left-Top-Top menus were shown to provide the fastest navigation in a popular early-2000s study. For presentation of legal information, no significant changes occurred, but the overall layout communicated that the shift to becoming a research tool rather than a digital bulletin board was well underway. Consolidations were only running a short 9-month delay!

In 2001 the digital legal information landscape of Canada underwent significant change. Access to the law saw significant advancements with search functions being built into the website and Folio VIEWS removed. The collection of federal legislation became comprehensive and the ability to search by title or keyword, or by using an advanced search template became available.

Minor visual changes include an increase in green, added details in the left menu, and a trending shift to Arial from Times New Roman. Folio VIEWS and explanatory text disappear in favour of double-columned headings and hyperlink overload. Frequently accessed Statutes appears along with “Major Statutes” (a term that is left undefined) and the option to search by subject became available. The design shifts of the early 2000s reflect the effort to organize an expanding legal collection in a way that improved both navigation and accessibility. This challenge continues today.

Notably, the option to search for federal and provincial case law appears in the left menu. This is historically significant to the digital legal landscape in Canada because the link takes users directly to CanLII. CanLII had just been founded by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada, funded by lawyers and notaries through their professional bodies and powered by Lexum’s technical infrastructure. It was not a government initiative, but a profession-driven project in open access to law. The fact that a federal website directed users to this new non-profit highlights a moment when public institutions and the legal profession were very openly building the digital legal ecosystem together. Today that relationship is more subtle.

Some aesthetic changes occurred in 2002. Mostly, the volume of hyperlinks was reduced, a better use of white space was applied, and Times New Roman makes a return for the focal information.

The website remains static until November 2005. The changes appear to be purely design related. A new “Serving Canadians” heading appears, the left menu distinguishes headings and links by colour with a stunning beige addition, and a switch back to Arial occurs. Note: The “Last Updated: 2005-09-13” seems to relate to substantive content and not design.

In 2006 a notice of upgrades to the Department of Justice’s ability to consolidate legislation online in a timely fashion appears, though several months between consolidations still seems to be standard.

In 2007 the first use of “Justice Laws” appears. However, the prominent change is that the simple search is emphasized. Instead of requiring the user to know a specific collection or source, keyword searching is presented as the first option. This is no surprise, as Google saw exponential growth during the early 2000s, cementing the simple search box and keyword searching as standards for information retrieval, fundamentally altering information seeking behaviours. Following Jakob’s Law for user design, users prefer all websites behave the same.

A gap in the Wayback Machine from late 2007 to 2010 possibly hides some changes, but the earliest 2010 capture reveals a significant shift. Consolidated Acts and Regulations became official for evidentiary purposes as of 1 June 2009. Provisions not yet in force were included but shaded, point in time access to consolidated legislation became available, and bilingual PDF downloads appeared for the first time. A new section listed precise consolidation dates for each statute and regulation. What matters most is the digital transformation this particular redesign represented. Electronic legislation was no longer purely for convenience or simply a reference tool. It carried legal authority in its own right. Electronic law had become the law rather than a digital echo of print.

The Standard on Web Usability was introduced in 2007, but became mandatory for all public-facing Government of Canada websites in September of 2011. Its purpose was to ensure that all Government of Canada websites followed consistent, user-centred design principles so visitors could find and use information more easily across departments. By prescribing common layout elements, navigation patterns, and usability requirements, the Standard reduced fragmentation and improved the overall coherence, accessibility, and reliability of government web content.

The Web Experience Toolkit (WET) became the recommended and then required technical implementation framework during this same period, being published in 2012 and mandatory adoption being enforced by 2013. WET’s value was (and remains) in providing an open-source, centrally maintained library of templates and website components that embodied best practices in accessibility, multilingual support, mobile responsiveness, and interoperability. It offered a practical way for departments to meet the obligations of the usability and accessibility standards while ensuring a consistent experience across federal websites.

In 2011, as result of the Standard on Web Usability and WET, Justice Laws grew more sophisticated through enhancements to legislation PDFs, including tables of provisions, navigation bookmarks, and clear last amended dates. Website features also improved with a slide out table of contents for navigating long documents, in document searching from the table of contents page, and updated HTML markup to support accessibility. A broader 2011 upgrade sped up document loading, expanded information on tables of contents, and introduced a more capable search engine that could scan across all collections. These changes brought Justice Laws from a site that assumed you had a mental map of federal legislation to one that finally helped you build one, a far cry from the 1997 bulletin board.

Specific to Justice Laws, the removal of the link to judicial decisions on the main page communicates the desire to emphasize the primary goal of the website: the provision of federal legislation. While earlier iterations had directed users to CanLII, by 2012 link was moved to the “Related Resources” page and remains there today.

The Justice Laws website was updated in January 2016. This version remained nearly identical for the next 9 years. This redesign met the latest version of the Web Experience Toolkit (WET) framework, which began to be updated quarterly in 2016. In hindsight, the longevity of the 2012 redesign is impressive compared to the previous iterations. With only small adjustments to layout and colour, this overall look persisted in from 2012 until November 2025. This is a remarkably long run that suggests the interface had become stable, familiar, and aligned with federal digital standards for more than a decade, likely due to the implementation of the Standard of Web Usability and WET. Also, in 2013, all government websites shifted to the canada.ca website and all updates to design specifications for canada.ca from 2019 onward are available online. Though Justice Laws lives under a gc.ca domain, the 2025 redesign id explicitly labelled as “Canada.ca redesign.”

I’ll withhold a written description and leave readers to make their own comparisons and draw their own conclusions about the current design. Many further observations could be made from analyzing the changes over the years. Combined with other data, other questions could be addressed. For example, whether standardization slows innovation in government websites and provision of legal information generally, or whether users perceive digital legislation as more authoritative based on design and presentation.

Across three decades of archived screenshots, the Justice Laws website reveals more than a series of visual redesigns. Each version reflected a changing view (literally) of how federal law should be accessed and understood online as everyday web use matured. Confined by early web capabilities, the earliest pages resembled static notice boards that demanded patience and expertise. Early versions of Justice Laws required significant prior knowledge of legislative research. Later iterations increasingly scaffolded navigation through search tools, tables of contents, and explanatory cues. The site gradually became cleaner, more structured, and more functional as web design evolved. This history also shows when authority moved from print to digital. Justice Laws maintained the structure of the print publications in a digital format allowing for the full research process to completed online (albeit from only from 2001 onward) by providing official laws, point-in-time access, reliable consolidation dates, and stable URLs.

This progress is worth recalling as legal technology enters another period of rapid change. The evolution of Justice Laws highlights the importance of preserving the structure of legal information in digital form. Generative AI offers new possibilities for improving access and navigation, but it also risks flattening the structure that communicates legislation’s evidentiary value. The history traced in this post shows that the design of Justice Laws plays a central role in communicating the value, authority, and organisation of federal law. Whatever direction digital legal information takes next, the long evolution of Justice Laws reminds us that careful design remains essential to meaningful access to the law.

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