UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT Eastern District of Virginia 401 Courthouse Square Alexandria, Virginia 22314-5799 March 5, 1997 Appellate Court and Circuit Administration Division ATTN: ABA Citation Resolution Suite 4-512 Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts Washington, DC 20544 Attention: Ms. Joan Countryman Dear Ms. Countryman: I am strongly opposed to adopting the ABA's official citation form for several reasons. On a philosophical level, efforts to homogenize the federal courts of this nation are shortsighted. Diversity among our federal courts encourages experimentation and progress and is one of the reasons the federal judiciary has remained so dynamic. Second, it is highly inappropriate for a group outside the judicial branch to suggest that judges conform their work to certain standards. To my knowledge, no federal judge is required to follow any particular form for his or her opinions. Some judges value brevity; some use literary flourishes; some include many footnotes, others use few; some follow Blue Book format, others do not; some only cite to the official source, and others include parallel cites. To mandate that judicial opinions conform to a specific format, such as numbering every paragraph and including parallel cites to electronic publications, seriously invades judicial independence. On a practical level, asking the district courts to number sequentially each "published" opinion will impose a significant burden on both chambers and clerk's office staff. In larger, multi- division courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia, some method for coordinating this sequential numbering will be necessary assuming that decisions are reported by district as they presently are. Will my secretary have to call a coordinator clerk who keeps track of each opinion issued by all judges in this district or dial into a special sequencing program to get a number for each opinion I publish before I send it out? Without intra-district networking, such coordination is unrealistic and unreliable. And how do my law clerks get these "parallel electronic cites"? Will Westlaw include them or are we back to some kind of Shepardizing? I understand that part of the impetus behind the ABA proposal is a concern about the proprietary way in which private, profit-making ventures, such as West Publishing Company, copyright their publication of our opinions. The belief is that our opinions belong to the public and should be readily available to all persons without having to pay fees to private vendors of that information. The traditionally invaluable service these private publishers have provided has been to organize and catalog judicial opinions into a reliable and accessible format. The Internet, of course, seriously challenges the old way of doing things and opens up the possibility that if the courts would do what private enterprise has been doing, then everyone in the world could have immediate, inexpensive access to judicial opinions. However, given the trend towards out sourcing governmental functions (of which the commercial publication of judicial opinions is a fine example) and significant budgetary limits on the federal judiciary, the ABA proposal presents an unnecessary financial burden. To implement this proposal would require either some allocation of scarce personnel resources or installation of technology which we do not have at this time and which is expensive. Although the concerns surrounding the ABA proposal have merit, I believe the solutions may lie elsewhere. Therefore, I recommend that the ABA shift its focus from the judiciary and work for changes within the private sector to accomplish the goal of inexpensive, universal access to judicial opinions. Very truly yours, Leonie M. Brinkema United States District Judge