TO:   Appellate Court and Circuit Administration Division 
ATTN: ABA Citation Resolution 
      Suite 4-512 
      Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts 
      Washington DC 20544 
 
                                   March 4, 1997 
 
     Comment on ABA Resolution to Adopt a Uniform Citation System for 
Print and Electronic Case Reports 
 
     1. We at the Directorate of Air Force Legal Information 
Services, Department of the Justice, Advocate General, United States 
Air Force, wholeheartedly agree with the American Bar Association's 
Citation Resolution, and commend the Association for its efforts. 
 
     2. The current explosion of print and electronic sources of case 
reports and other information is a positive development for the legal 
system and the legal profession. Unfettered access to the law by the 
members of the legal profession and the public is necessary to 
maintain a fair and democratic system of justice. The current 
profusion legal resources in a wide variety of publishing formats, 
permits the widest disseminating legal information at costs 
affordable to individual citizens and solo practitioners, to large 
law firms and government agencies. Our own organization is a 
contributor to dissemination effort by providing Federal Legal 
Information Through Electronics (FLITE), a system offering a wide 
range of legal materials vital to the practice of and federal law in 
an electronic format accessible to the Department of Defense 
community. Our customers practice in many different jurisdictions, 
courts and forums system of universal, permanent, immediately 
available citations for electronic media greatly ease the burden of 
parallel citing and cross referencing for those customers would also 
significantly increase the speed and reduce the cost of adding new 
decision our data base. 
 
     3. At present, the Federal courts require citation to federal 
reporters in a format a century ago, by a private print publisher, 
West Publishing Inc. That citation system based on book volume and 
printed page number does not translate well to electronic medium. 
Furthermore, the current system of pin point citations is subject to 
copyright claims, and is not freely useable by other computer-
assisted legal research systems, FLITE. A significant portion of our 
costs for providing data to customers is the lab necessary to import 
multiple parallel citations into documents. There are many sour 
accurate court documents and decisions from which we could procure 
data for our customers at either low cost or no cost if it were not 
for the additional cost of incorporating uniform official citations 
into those documents. We are a governmental agency, therefore the 
ultimate cost of providing data in compliance with the current 
citation system is born by the taxpayer. Because of the copyright 
restrictions, we can use the pin point page citations at all. 
 
     4. Computer technology, particularly the world wide web, permits 
the virtually instantaneous publication of decisions rendered final 
by a court. However use of this material is hampered by the inability 
of a party, researcher, scholar or member of the public to 
effectively cite to a publication until those same materials are 
formatted printed reports with volume and page numbers assigned, a 
process which takes a considerable amount of time. The present 
citation system may function well for conventional printed reports, 
however requiring electronic case systems to use these printed 
citation references deprives users of the speed of electronic 
publication. T overall benefits of electronic systems, the lower 
cost, the lower space requirements the lower transportation costs as 
compared to print medium demand that an accommodation be made to ease 
those systems citation burdens. Our customers are located around the 
globe and often must perform legal services in places where elect 
legal research is a necessity because print medium is either not 
available or is imp A laptop, CD-ROM disks and a modem connection to 
the internet are often the entire contents of a Department of Defense 
legal professional's office. 
 
     5. A system whereby all case authorities are cited by stating 
the year, a designator court, the sequential number of the decision, 
and where reference is to specific mat within the decision, the 
paragraph number at which that material appears, is suitable both 
print and electronic medium. Such standardization will permit the 
profession a public to acquire decisional materials from the source 
or vendor of their choosing, into account, ease of use and 
accessibility, cost, and timelines of publication. In the suggested 
uniform system guarantees to the Courts, litigants, and interested 
per the accuracy of materials cited to them as authoritative. 
 
     6. The suggested system is effective for all English language 
materials. The language based on an organizational scheme of 
paragraphs based on content and universal stand of grammar and 
punctuation. The current citation system relying on pagination is not 
uniform, because pagination varies due to font size and style, page 
length or width, display methodology when in electronic form. A 
standard system of citation should be designed broadly enough to be 
used for all federal court cases, and should sufficient practical to 
encourage adoption by other courts and decisional bodies. Our 
organization has over 30 years of experience in dealing with multiple 
formats and citation styles would gladly accept a single format which 
is relatively simple to implement and inte. The ABA's proposal 
clearly achieves that result. 
 
Ms. Lynn A. Mokray                      Mr. James H. Unterspan   
Attorney/ Advisor                       Director, Dept. of       
Air Force Legal Information Services    Legal Systems            
Air Force Legal Services Agency
Maxwell Air Force Base, AL 36112