UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
                            FIFTH CIRCUIT
                         Office of the Clerk
                           600 Camp Street
                       New Orleans, LA  70130

!NR
March 7, 1997 
 
Appellate Court and Circuit Administration Division 
ATTN: ABA Citation Resolution 
Suite 4-512 
Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts 
Washington, D.C. 20544 
!EN
     In August 1996, the American Bar Association (ABA) approved a 
resolution made by its Special Committee on Citation Issues calling 
for state and federal courts to develop a standard citation system 
and recommending a format that could be used by state and federal 
courts. That resolution would require courts to identify the citation 
on each decision at the time the decision is made available to the 
public. The standard form of citation, for a decision in a federal 
court of appeals, should include the year of the decision, the court, 
the decision number, the paragraph number where the material referred 
to is located and the parallel citation. 

     This office opposes the ABA resolution. We see no need to 
introduce a new sequential decision number into the operations of 
this court. To create the ABA proposed "standard" form of citation 
would require additional work at several levels. Initially, we would 
have to: 

     1. Devise and coordinate with our judges a means for assigning 
     the sequential decision numbers; 

     2. Create or modify existing AIMS events for the decision number 
     to be included in the AIMS database; 

     3. Devise a means of answering inquiries from the public seeking 
     information on the new decision number assigned; 

     4. Create and maintain a permanent cross reference between the 
     docket number and the opinion number; 

     5. Train employees to answer inquiries from the Court and the 
     bar on the newly established procedures. 

     Several of the above tasks would also have to be preformed in a 
daily basis. We estimate an opinion clerk would have to spend an 
additional five minutes per opinion to assign a decision number and 
docket the appropriate information in AIMS. We also estimate another 
five minutes per opinion for the authoring judge's staff to number 
the paragraphs of the opinions. Our biggest concern is the time 
clerk's office personnel will spend answering inquiries from the 
public regarding gaps in decision numbers, if for example an opinion 
is withdrawn, requesting citations, and requesting the full case 
information when all they have available is a citation. 

     Now that virtually all the circuit courts' opinions are 
available on the Internet, there is a great public access to the 
court's decisions. At least in this court, our opinions are 
identifiable by case number, court and date of decision,, e.g. Smith 
v. Jones, No. 97-10113 (5th Cir. Mar. 7, 1997). We question why we 
would want to invest time and money in the ABA proposed form, when it 
imposes a burden on this court with no perceptible benefit. 
!NR
                                   Sincerely, 

                                   Charles R. Fulbruge III 
                                   Clerk
!EN