I do not see a drawback. Let us also assume that the same opinion was
available in say a fictional 33 CCH-BNA-LCP-MB Securites Law Reporter as
well.
Then, someone only with that reporter would only need that reporter and
the cite would be:
SEC v. Jones, 999 F.2d 938, 942 <19>, 33 CCH-BNA-LCP-MB Securities Law
Reporter 535 <19>.
Seems easy to me. A securities law practioner could do most of herhis
work without ever traversing to the law library to find Volume 999 of
Federal Reporter 2nd, as long as the perit subscribed to CCH-BNA-LCP-MB
Securities Law Reporter. Indeed, one may even find it on a Michie CD-ROM
or HyperLaw CD-ROM (remember, Lexis can use West internal page numbers on
Lexis on-line, but not Michie CD-ROM's!!!!). Even more, assume someone
had an article from the National Law Journal analyzing the opinion just
after it was issues and it was a 50 page opinion. Of course, there would
have been no Fed. 2d cite then, but the author could precisely refer to
Paragraph 19. And, let us say one write a brief in another case three
weeks later: one can refer to paragraph 19, and 4 month later when the
judge is writing his/her opinion and now has the bound volume open, my
gosh, the brief still refers to paragraph 19 of a slip opinion which is
not page 242 but also identified as paragraph 19.
Also, re your comment as to what happened at the meeting, the purpose had
intended to be to focus on the questions you asked and to toss around
techinical issues such as using angle bars <> around the paragraph number
in the citation and, indeed, some feel that the angle bars should be
reserved for the paragraph number in the margin, so as to have no
confusion as to the number marking a paragraph itself, and the paragraph
number used in the citation.
The idea is to faciliate computer searching of a document to find the
paragraph number so that ultimately the paragraph number would be a
Hypertext Markup (HTML) hypertext target. HTML is a subset of SGML used by
all most legal publishers internally and HTML is sweeping the Internet as
the markup language for Mosaic WWW servers etc.
Unfortunately, the meeting was diverted, by both valuable contibutions as
well as certain diversionary statements.
Alan Sugarman
HyperLaw
sugarman@panix.com
On Thu, 15 Dec 1994, Cindy Chick wrote:
> Alan -
>
> Now this is starting to make more sense. I'm probably missing something,
> but wouldn't it be easy for the courts to just incorporate paragraph
> numbers into their slip opinions? Then if people wanted to cite to the
> paragraph number instead of the page number, they would have that
> option? Something like 249 F2d 942 <19> ? Then you could use the page
> number if you wanted to for the jump cite or use the paragraph number if
> you wanted to?
>
> What are the drawbacks to this method? (There are some, no doubt, so
> this is not a rhetorical question.)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> Cindy Chick cchick@netcom.com
> Los Angeles, CA 90017
> -------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Wed, 14 Dec 1994, Alan Sugarman wrote:
>
> > 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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