Carol D. Billings, Director Law Library of Louisiana Supreme Court Building, Room 100 301 Loyola Avenue New Orleans, Louisiana March 14, 1997 Appellate Court and Circuit Administration Division ATTN: ABA Citation Resolution Suite 4-512 Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts Washington, DC 20544 To whom it may concern: On December 17, 1993, the Supreme Court of Louisiana unanimously adopted a mandatory "public domain citation format" for citing all opinions and actions issued by the Supreme Court and Courts of Appeal. The new rule applied to all documents issued after December 31, 1993, and became mandatory on July 1, 1994. Thus Louisiana became the first state to give practical application to the principles that advocates of citation reform have been propounding for a number of years. While the public domain format that the Louisiana rule requires differs from that recommended by the ABA, it was adopted for exactly the same reasons with the same philosophy in mind. (The format uses the docket number, court abbreviation, and date of release.) The Supreme Court of Louisiana wished to promote prompt access to court documents by the legal community and the public at the lowest possible cost. It also wished to find an alternative to a citation format that required use of the claimed intellectual property of a commercial publisher, which it believed conferred an unfair advantage upon that publisher to the exclusion of others. Recognizing that the electronic dissemination of opinions via the Internet was about to become commonplace, the Justices knew that a citation that could be applied to a document at the time of release would facilitate the public's use of the information. In fact, the Louisiana Supreme Court established a web site in March, 1996, where its opinions may be accessed on the day of release. As the chair of the committee that proposed Louisiana's public domain citation format to the Court, I have become a strong advocate for citation reform. During 1994/95 I served as President of the American Association of Law Libraries, the national organization which has pioneered citation reform efforts, recommending a format almost identical to the ABA's nearly a year and a half before last August. Chief Justice Pascal F. Calogero of the Louisiana Supreme Court has encouraged me to "take the lead" in providing information to other interested government agencies about Louisiana's experience with our new public domain format. Many people have inquired about why Louisiana's new citation format is different from the AALL and ABA recommendations. The simple answer is that it came about so much earlier than the other proposals, that our justices were reluctant to make a change in the procedures for releasing opinions. They had no one else's experience to use as a guide. Consequently, when my committee in the fall of 1993 recommended a new format virtually identical to the one later proposed by the Wisconsin Bar, AALL, and the ABA, it seemed radical. More than three years ago our Court was less technologically sophisticated, and procedures that now seem simple, appeared to be potentially daunting. Therefore, the Court compromised and chose to adopt a format that accomplished its purpose without requiring a change in the way their staff's and the Clerk of Court's staff produced the opinions. The Supreme Court's approval of the new public domain format was vigorously opposed by the West Publishing Company. Via letters and telephone calls to the state's judges and lawyers and visits by company officials, the company attempted to convince the Justices that the change to a new citation system would cause chaos in the state's legal community. They argued that the new system could not be implemented without establishing an office of a state reporter of decisions at an annual cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. They argued that the clerks' offices would be burdened with new duties. Surely, they claimed, the state's lawyers would not be able to master the new system. The new system has now been in use for more than three years, and none of West's dire predictions has come to pass. The Louisiana legal system still operates as it did. The Court made sure that a number of articles explaining the new citation format appeared in bar publications, and soon the state's lawyers accepted it without complaint. Two new CD-ROM versions of Louisiana's reports were soon being published, and the existing West CD-ROM product dropped drastically in price to meet the competition. Law Office Information Systems (LOIS) and West now offer their CD-ROM versions of the opinions at a cost affordable to many solo and small practitioners. Competition would not have been possible had not the new citation format, which makes reference to Louisiana cases without using West's claimed intellectual property, come into being. The Supreme Court's web site is now accessed heavily by Louisiana attorneys and others needing the opinions promptly after release. Louisiana's delegation to the ABA meeting last August voted with the majority in the House of Delegates to approve the Citation Issues Committee's recommendation. The current President of the Louisiana Bar, Charles S. Weems, III, wrote to me following the meeting, urging me to continue my efforts to encourage the adoption of the ABA format in Louisiana. I strongly support Louisiana changing its citation format to comply with the ABA recommendation. I have consulted with Chief Justice Calogero about this, and at his suggestion, I am preparing a proposal to that effect which he plans to take before the Supreme Court. I am optimistic that such a proposal will succeed and that Louisiana will remain in the vanguard in the cause of citation reform and improved access to legal information. I strongly urge the federal courts to lead the way in adopting and implementing the use of the ABA-recommended citation format to facilitate the public's access to the laws that govern them. The law belongs to the people, and the federal courts should do everything in their power to remove artificial barriers, such as a vendor- controlled citation system, to that law. Our democracy and system of justice depend upon it. Very truly yours, Carol D. Billings Director, Law Library of Louisiana