DATE: May 25, 1994
TO: Marcia Koslov <WSLLMJK@macc.wisc.edu>
State Law Librarian, Wisconsin State Law Library
FROM: Chris and Jill Wren <CGWREN@ACM.ORG>
We read with interest your re-posting to LAW-LIB the message
you received from John Lederer, chair of the Technology Resources
Committee of the State Bar of Wisconsin, summarizing the
committee's proposal to reform the citation and publication of
Wisconsin court decisions. His message leads us to believe that
it responds to an inquiry from you that was prompted, at least in
part, by comments in an e-mail message we sent to Gary Sherman,
president-elect of the State Bar. (Our message to President-
elect Sherman answered his e-mail message to us about a memo we
sent to the State Bar's Board of Governors regarding the
Technology Resources Committee's reform proposal.)
A chronology will probably help provide a background for
understanding John Lederer's message and this response. At the
January 1994 meeting of the State Bar's Board of Governors, the
Technology Resources Committee presented a resolution outlining
the committee's proposal to reform the citation and publication
of Wisconsin court decisions. According to the minutes of the
Board's meeting, the resolution passed unanimously (although
President-elect Sherman wrote to us that "You might be interested
to know that I was the only no vote when the matter came before
the board of governors in January").
We first learned about the Board's action through the March
1994 issue of the Dane County Bar Association's newsletter, which
contained a report of the January meeting from one of the local
members of the Board. We obtained a copy of the resolution and
the minutes from the State Bar and wrote a response in the form
of a memo sent on April 11 to the President and President-elect
of the State Bar and to the chair of the Board of Governors.
(The State Bar itself has published two announcements related
to the committee's proposal. The March 1994 issue of Wisconsin
Lawyer carried a report of the Board's actions at the January
meeting, noting that the Board "supported dialogue between the
Technology Resource Committee and interested parties outside the
State Bar to develop an alternative system of citation." The May
1994 issue of the State Bar newsletter ran an item under the
headline "Should case citation be simplified?" The newsletter
piece noted only that "[a] state agency *could* be designated to
provide new case reports -- and even existing case reports -- in
electronic format" (emphasis added). The report ended by
inviting "suggestions or comments on *citation formats*"
(emphasis added) for the Board to consider at its June meeting.
Neither the notices from the State Bar nor the report in the Dane
County Bar Association newsletter sufficiently alert bar members
or other readers to the part of the committee's proposal dealing
with the reorganization of case reporting in Wisconsin.)
John Lederer contacted us by e-mail on April 12, the day he
received his courtesy copy of our memo. He suggested meeting for
lunch to discuss our memo and the committee's proposal, and he
and Chris met on Wednesday, April 20.
In his message to you, Lederer repeats the committee's
rationales for its proposal. Because we dealt with those claims
in our April 11 memo, and because Lederer's message doesn't add
anything new on those points, we won't re-hash here the response
we offered in our memo.
Lederer also states, however, that "We [the committee]
emphatically do *not* wish to replace printed cases with CD-ROM"
(his emphasis). In our view, this statement needs additional
context so it's clear what Lederer is -- and is not -- saying.
At the April 20 meeting, Lederer and Chris discussed at length
the committee's resolution and our April 11 memo. Lederer
emphasized that the committee's resolution reflected only a first
step and merely sought the Board's approval for further
development of the proposed reforms.
To highlight the tentative nature of the committee's
resolution in January, Lederer told Chris that since presenting
the resolution to the Board, the committee had come strongly to
the view that the *official* version of Wisconsin court decisions
should be published in an electronic form only and should be
published only by the court, and that the West and Lawyers
Cooperative/Callaghan's versions of Wisconsin decisions should
become unofficial reporters. Chris remarked that this
characterization seemed a substantial shift from the committee's
original proposal of having electronic publication and citation
as alternatives rather than replacements for existing official
publications and citations.
Lederer agreed that this position represented a change from
the position in the resolution. Chris then asked specifically
whether the committee's proposal would include an official
version in print format, and Lederer said it would not. He said
the committee strongly favored recommending that Wisconsin courts
publish the official versions of their decisions only in
electronic formats. Publishers (or anyone else) could obtain the
official version by copying from the CD-ROM version or by
downloading from a BBS. At that point, they could publish those
decisions in print format (or any other format, for that matter).
But print versions of Wisconsin court decisions would be
unofficial because the only official version would appear in
electronic form on the court's BBS or on the state-published
CD-ROM disc. Lederer said the committee would make that
recommendation to the Board in June.
As described by Lederer to Chris, the committee's proposal
would not literally "replace" all printed cases; anyone could
still publish court decisions in a print format (although not as
official versions of those decisions). But the committee's new
plan will (as described by Lederer to Chris) in fact replace
*official* printed cases. Under the new proposal, the *only*
authoritative source of those decisions will reside in online and
CD-ROM bytes, not in print versions. Thus, anyone who wants to
obtain an *official* version of a Wisconsin decision will need
either online access to the court's BBS or a copy of the court's
CD-ROM.
We believe those requirements force lawyers and Wisconsin
citizens -- indeed, anyone who wants or needs access to the
official version of Wisconsin court decisions -- into a
relationship to government information that will impede rather
than expand access to that information. Although we still
believe (for the reasons set forth in our April 11 memo) the
committee's proposal outlined in its January resolution will not
have the benefits touted by the committee and ignores significant
drawbacks, that proposal at least has the virtue of offering an
additional access point to the official version of government
information (albeit primarily for those who already have access
to that information anyway). In our view, the revised proposal
retreats from that position and takes a long stride in the other
direction.
The issue of electronic citation and publication of court
decisions obviously has considerable interest for subscribers to
LAW-LIB. Perhaps you could arrange with the State Bar to have
the committee's resolution, the relevant minutes of the Board's
January meeting, and the responses Lederer mentions in his
message (as well as any other responses the committee receives)
posted as a file on WISOLL, the Wisconsin State Law Library's
BBS. That way, others interested in learning from the Wisconsin
experience could dial up and download the documents at their
convenience.
================================================================================
YOUR ORIGINAL MESSAGE
> From:IN%"WSLLMJK@macc.wisc.edu"
> To:IN%"law-lib@ucdavis.edu" "Multiple recipients of list"
> CC:
> Subj:Posting this for Tech Resource Comm chair State Bar of Wi Marcia
> Date: Wed, 18 May 1994 13:57:46 -0700
>
>
> From:IN%"74020.210@CompuServe.COM" "John Lederer" 17-MAY-1994 16:08:00.05
> To:WSLLMJK@macc.wisc.edu
> CC:
> Subj:Comments on CD-ROM
> Date: 17 May 94 17:03:51 EDT
>
>
> Marcia,
>
> Please feel free to post this elsewhere:
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> I am the Chairman of the Wisconsin State Bar's Technology Resource Committee.
>
> I thought I would write a note saying directly what we hope to do in
> Wisconsin, though I caution that it is an evolving process.
>
> We emphatically do *not* wish to replace printed cases with CD-ROM.
>
> We are interested in making case law available to the most people at the
> lowest cost. We also are interested in improving the efficiency of case
> citation.
>
> Right now, we are looking to do that through two changes. In Wisconsin most
> appellate decisions are produced in elctronic format. They are posted by the
> Clerk's Office on a BBS from which West's, Lawyer's Co-op, and Lexis download
> them for publishing.
>
> Our proposal has two parts. First, we want the authoritative "master"
> version of the court's decision to be those in the Clerk's office. Any
> publisher, whether West's, Lawyer's Co-Op, or Marvel Comic Books would be
> able to obtain a copy from the Clerk's office and publish them in whatever
> form they wanted -- whether it be paper, CD-ROM, or whatever. Hopefully,
> some publishers will add value to their published copies, by headnotes, or
> search engines, or whatever.
> The idea here is that the state should "own" its own official records and
> that they should be available to all on equal terms.
>
> The second problem is the citation system itself. Currently the citations
> required by the Supreme Court in practical effect (1) require citing to
> Lawyer's Co-op or West's and (2) require parallel cites. This creates some
> problems:
>
> 1. Parallel cites waste time
>
> 2. The citation is wedded to the printing process. That impedes those who
> might want to publish electronically who have to add in page nos from printed
> volumes.
> Moreover it ties the speed of publication in any form by the pace of the
> printing process.
>
> 3. West's claimed copyright in page numbers creates a problem for others who
> might want to publish.
>
> 4. It keeps the State from "owning" the cite.
>
>
> Our conclusions are tentative at this point -- we are still in the process of
> getting input, but we do have on the table a proposal to have the original
> opinions have numbered paragraphs. We could then cite by year of decision,
> court, sequnetial case number and paragraph number, e.g. 1993 Wis. App. 1275,
> par.35.
> (some of us call this form Chapter & Verse since in some respects it is
> similar to a biblical citattion, or any ancient historical citation prior to
> printing.
>
> The advanatge is that the same cite can be used by anybody -- paper
> publishers, CD-ROM publishers, producers of specialized reporters, etc.
> because the cite is inherent in the opinion (which would have the year,
> court, case number, and paragraph numbers innate in it). No parallel cites
> would be necessary. For a paper publisher, the only modification that he
> might want to make is instead of putting a volume number of the spine of the
> book, to instead say "Cases 1200-1350"
>
> I stress that our committee has proposed nothing formally at this point. We
> went to the Board of Governors in January with the question of whether we
> should pursue this. They unanimously voted to have us do that, and most of
> the comments were along the "why didn't you do this sooner". However, there
> are lots of details to be worked out, and the Committee as a whole has not
> endorsed anything at this point.
>
> We have been fortunate to have input from the State Law Librarian, the
> Revisor of Statutes, the Judicial Conference, a number of publishers, and
> the Wrens.
>
> I would *welcome* anyone's thoughts,comments, or suggestions. Though I
> think we are on the right track, I do not want lawyers cursing me 50 years
> from now as one of the numbskulls that established this whacko system<g> .
> We want to get it right.
>
> I would also be interested in what any other jurisdictions might be doing.
>
> Regards
> John
> CIS: 74020,210
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