Subject: Citation System Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 11:31:44 -0500 From: "Thomas M. Susman" To: citation@teo.uscourts.gov ABA Citation Resolution Administrative Office of the United States Courts Washington, DC Gentlemen: I write to urge the courts of the United states to develop a uniform, vendor neutral system for citation of opinions based upon the recommendation of the American Bar Association's Resolution. As a practicing lawyer with almost 30 years of government and private bar experience, I have been trying to catch up with my children's generation in terms of technology literacy. The more I use on-line services, and even the more I find myself using printed material from electronic sources, the less I understand why at least the federal courts cannot move quickly and smoothly to a citation system that makes sense regardless of the form or format of the case. It is surely no coincidence that for decades draft legislation has carried section, subsection, and paragraph numbers and corporate documents carry paragraph and subparagraph numbers. The reason is clear: convenience of reference for the reader or user of the document -- and long before electronic production was available. Likewise, librarians figured out long ago that it was not particularly helpful to the public if each library used a different system for cataloging materials. Why? For the convenience of the public in having a uniform, widely available method of referencing materials. Probably the best known precedent is the Bible itself, both Old and New Testaments: no matter the date, publisher, or edition, the presence of chapter and verse numbers makes for easy, ready reference. It is only the entrenchment and hisotric monopoly of a single publisher in the legal publishing business that has deprived the public of the benefits of an objective, universal reference system for federal court cases. So long as the primarily available text was printed by that publisher, this presented no particular problem. But times have changed. Judicial opinions are available from increasingly diverse sources, in increasingly diverse formats (print, on-line, CD- ROM), and with the increasing diversity comes increasing confusion, nearing chaos, regarding proper citation and reference. It is not as if this is a difficult problem to solve. The ABA presented in its report a system for federal court citations that is uniform, neutral, and -- probably most important -- simple to understand. It transcends form and format, publisher and disseminater. The federal court system should adopt it without delay. As to costs and benefits, the balance would appear overwhelmingly in the benefit column. The benefits are outlined above: ease of reference and research, facilitating and encouraging multiple sources, ultimately lowering prices and other obstacles to access. The costs? It is quite improbable that word processing software used by the judiciary cannot, starting today, generate numbered paragraphs in the margin or at the start of each new paragraph. Nor will it be more than the slightest inconvenience to adopt the neutral citation system recommended by the ABA, with whatever parallel citations the courts care to encourage (or, for a transition period, to require). And the cost to publishers and disseminaters will go down, without having to either pay license fees or take time to include parallel references, thus lowering the price to consumers. So, in the end, the adoption of this vendor neutral, uniform citation system is a win for the courts, a win for practicing lawyers and their clients, a win for other users of judicial opinions, a win for on-line publishers, and a win for law libraries. Decisionsl like this should always be so simple! Respectfully submitted, Thomas M. Susman Ropes & Gray 1301 K Street, N.W. Suite 800-East Washington, DC 20004 202-626-3920