On 11/3/94, Jamie Love wrote:
>Things the court should assume responsibity for:
..
> Compliation: It seems reasonable to have the courts number their
opinions. This isn't beyond their own competence.
WHOA! This is an assumption that might seem reasonable to a non-lawyer, but
anybody who's ever seen a brief studded with official cites in the form: "
___ Rptr ___ " knows that the courts have proven that numbering their own
opinions (within the timeframe needed by the legal profession) is definitely
beyond their competence. That's why West has built such a large empire.
This may also explain the incredulity that various parties have expressed
about other people's reactions to L'affair Berring. Love and Sugarman can't
understand why we law librarians don't share their outrage over West's
attempt to use this letter to prove that West cites aren't required. They
assume that we would be incensed about having been mislead. But those of us
who use and teach the Bluebook know that West cites are required, either as
parallels or (in the 15th edition) as the sole cite, for just about every
case citation. We weren't mislead by the letter, so we find it harder to get
riled up about it.
The issue that seems more important to me (and I assume to the other law
librarians who have been responding in similar ways) is that the West
citations have been the only ones I could rely on for efficient citation. No
other publisher has a comprehensive system, so excluding West would produce a
patchwork. And the official reporters are notoriously late, so relying on
them would produce meaningless cites for all recent opinions.
This is not idle speculation. The United States Reports are running so far
behind that the West advance sheet pamphlets fall apart before the final
bound volume can be produced (it has to wait for the official cite). As a
result, West now produces interim bound volumes--an extra expense to me and
every other library that was caused not by greedy capitalists nor by a
monopoly position but by the government's incompetence to do a simple job.
Even in New York, where our official reports are contracted out to a private
publisher to avoid this sort of government mismanagement, the official
reports are still behind the West product (I direct your attention to 65
N.Y.2d 967, where the official report for an appeal was forced to use an
incomplete cite to the case below because the official reporter hadn't been
published--the West cite was available).
The situation is even worse with statutes, and God help us if the new Federal
case numbering system is handled by the bureaucracy responsible for
publishing treaties: UST got so far behind that the government started TIAS
as an advance product; but TIAS is now also so far behind that two private
publishers have started unofficial treaty publications.
Dealing with official products like these day in and day out has turned me
away from any solution that relies on more government involvement in
citations. Thank God that West has been around to rescue us from the
incompetence of government case publication, and that the legal profession
has been free to develop a citation system that relies on the West cites that
are available rather than the official cites that don't exist when we need
them.
I agree that citation to page numbers has become artificial in today's
mixed-technology system, but any new system must be based on data that seems
likely to be available when we need it. The historical record shows that
West could deliver, and the government couldn't. Any vendor-neutral proposal
has to work in practice, not just in theory. So I consider it an essential
part of the proposal to know WHO is going to coordinate and ensure the timely
creation of all the required information. That's the weakness in the current
proposals.
Greg Koster
CUNY Law School
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 03/09/00 PST