One of the attendees at the TAP meeting on Dec.12, was J.C. Smith, a
member of the law faculty of the University of British of Columbia which
is working with the B.C. courts on electronic dissemination and citation
issues.
He reported that the Chief Justice of the B.C. Supreme Court (I think I
have the right name of the court) had recently required that future court
opinions bear official paragraph numbers and recent opinions have
contained such numbers.
Professor Smith brought with him an advance sheet publihsed by Carswell,
the largest Canadian Publisher of legal opinions which showed the
paragraph numbers in the margin in a very unobtrusive way.
Professor Smith also said that Carswell (owned by Thomson which also owns
LCP), used paragraph numbers in all of its other law reports, although
they only have official status for B.C. opinions.
One benefit is that in the bilingual Canadian jurisdictions, opinions are
published in French and English, and, that pagination in two versions
would not be parallel unless it was "forced".
But, the driving force in the B.C. cases was to provide an efficient
method of official citation to be applied at the time of issuance and
which would work well in the print and electronic environment.
I note this last point. Some have suggested that the driving force is
animus against West. That was not the case in British Columbia and is
not, in my judgment, the reason in the United States. After all, if the
courts would just keep the initial page number in the slip opinion as the
official page number, this would still serve the purpose of a vendor
neutral citation, It would not however be medium neutral. Every time I
see a page break in the middle of a citation, an indented quotation, a
sentence, of a hyphenated word, and the awkward compromises presented
thereby (moving the page break to the end of the word, the citation,
etc., designing a search engine which ignores page numbers, using an
asterik to represent the break etc. 1 F.2d *3 4 which means that page 3
broke in the middle of the cite "1 F.2d 4"), the thought that something
is wrong crosses my mind.
As to the point of amendments to opinions that are paginated or
paragraphed, I see no difference in the confusion or difficulty. Page 1a
or paragraph 1a, what is the difference?
Alan Sugarman
HyperLaw
sugarman@panix.com
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