Re Rich Leiter's posting on the TAP Meeting and the use of paragraph numbers:
Thank you for taking the time to work out your views so carefully, and for
having the courage to post them despite the evidence that Love & Sugarman
will flame anything that moves.
I found your report immensely valuable, since it is the first posting that
describes the meeting from the non-TAP point of view. It was not surprising
that your descriptions sound like an entirely different meeting--it is
becoming more and more obvious that Love & Sugarman are quite simply
anti-West fanatics who are determined to destroy the present system whether
or not there is a viable alternative.
This is a shame, as I think there are really intersting issues that need to
be debated and thought through (and I will cop to sometimes doing it in that
order!). The present system does work well enough (for those who really
depend on it) that I am very leery of attempts to destroy it in order to
provide a speculative benefit to those whose needs are relatively minuscule.
But, it is also true that technology has made printed-page-based citations a
quaint fiction for much legal research.
Therefore I would like to see a technology-neutral citation system (which
should also be as vendor neutral as is necessary to avoid the waste and
tedium of finding parallel cites). My own position at the moment is that an
ideal system would use the West NRS basic cites, with paragraph numbers for
pinpoints.
Your posting is the first I have seen that seriously raises the issue whether
paragraph numbers might not be a good thing (beyond the pratical concerns
about who is going to assign them in a way that will be both authentic and
fast). This is an extremely important issue. If you are right, that using
paragraph numbers will change the way we look at stare decisis, the proposed
changes could be a major step backward for the legal profession.
I don't immediately resonate with the rightness of your point, since pinpoint
cites are most often used to identify quotations, which are already smaller
than paragraphs. But I want more time to think and talk about it before we
get locked in.
I also think it's ironic that Bob Berring is being pilloried as a West shill,
since this larger issue you raise reminds me of a similar issue that Bob has
been talking about for years: whether the West Key Number system has shaped
the way we view the law by chanelling our thinking into a 19th century
positivist framework. Acceptance of that view would be far more devastating
to West's cash flow than any change in citation systems!
Maybe by the AALS Meeting in January TAP will have moved on to another
"flavor of the month" and we can explore these issues in a less heated and
more disinterested atmosphere. I notice that one of the breakout groups of
the Mini-Workshop on Uses of Technology in Research and Teaching is on "The
Future of Legal Citations." Perhaps that session, or a separate one outside
the ambit of the workshop, can include everyone who wishes to explore these
issues.
Greg Koster
CUNY Law School
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