One of Dorothy's points was
>case reports -- that has been compiled. West editors, for
>example, select from some 700,000 federal District Court and
>Bankruptcy Court case dispositions to publish roughly 9,500 in
>hardcopy and 15,000 online -- a significant editorial undertaking
>even before coordination and arrangement occurs.
I do not want to debate whether these numbers are accurate. Nor do I
want to debate the value of this editorial work. It is valuable. I'd
like ask those who choose to respond to this message to assume that West
publishes (through either the print reporters or Westlaw) substantially
less than 100% of the opinions written by the federal and state judiciary.
Now assuming that
1) West does indeed publish substantially less than 100%
of the opinions and
2) many of these unpublished opinions are available
from the courts to other publisher's who may choose to publish
some of them in electronic or other forms and
3) some of these unpublished opinions are available to the attorneys
and the public through some court bulletin boards which are
likely to expand in the future and
4) there is some overlap between all of these methods of accessing
opinions and
5) none of these methods is truely comprehensive
don't we need a relatively uniform system of citation that covers not
only those opinions that West chooses to publish but also those that
are published by others or are accessible through the bulletin boards?
I personally think that the current method of citing to published opinions,
unofficially published opinions and unpublished opinions is cumbersome.
But I am not at all sure that what has been proposed so far is any
less cumbersome. Nor am I sure that the DOJ proposal and issues framed in
terms of copyright and ownership are the right context in which to address
this problem. I think that what we really need might be a rewriting of
the Harvard Bluebook to simpify it.
I see the problem related to how to do pinpoint citations to internal
locations in opinions that are not printed, but I'm not at all sure
that paragraph numbering is the solution. If I were starting a new system
in a world that did not have print before electronics, did not have
selective print publication of opinions, and did not have a history
of inefficient government agencies including courts, I might
go with paragraph numbering. But that is not what we have. I see a
benefit from some uniform set of rules on how to locate some internal
point in a long opinion, but I know of no group or organization
that I would want to trust with numbering all the paragraphs in all
those opinions (more than West publishes) in a timely and consistent
manner at a reasonable cost. At present, I tend to think that a system
that completely abolished pin point citation might be the best compromise.
I don't think that in an age of electronic publication that the location
of quotations within even a long opinion is nearly as difficult as
it was when we only had paper publication.
However, if all we did was
abolish pinpoint citation, that still would not solve the problem of
helping people who subscribe to a variety of competing products find
the same opinion in those different products. In particular it would not
solve the problem for those 5000 to 6000 cases a year that West publishes
online but which have no West Reporter system citation. Nor would it
solve the problem for the approximately 685,000 opinions a year that
West chooses not to publish at all.
A good from the beginning citation that would give anyone the information
they needed to find any opinion in any form in which it was disseminated
or published would serve my idea of why we have citations. But so far
I haven't seen any proposal that I think could actually deliver this
result at a reasonable cost. So as far as I am concerned, I think the
jury is still out. However, I would like to see some theoretical
discussion of the mechanics of how several such systems might work, so that
I can figure out whether the ideal of a good from the beginning across the
board citation is anything more than a pipe dream.
I hope this message doesn't generate another flame war, but instead
gets to some of the real issues in this debate.
Mary Brandt Jensen University of South Dakota
Director of the Law Library School of Law
Professor of Law 414 E. Clark St.
MJENSEN@CHARLIE.USD.EDU Vermillion, SD 57069-2390
(605) 677 6363 Fax (605) 677 6357
My opinions are my own and do not represent the opinions of any
organization I may be affiliated with.
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