Subject: Please adopt the public-domain citation form
Date:    Fri, 14 Mar 97 19:08:08 GMT
From:    adelstein@appellatelaw.com (Bruce Adelstein)
To:      citation@teo.uscourts.gov

Bruce Adelstein
Attorney at Law
11661 San Vicente Boulevard, Suite 1015
Los Angeles, CA 90049
(310) 9769-3565
email: adelstein@appellatelaw.com

March 14, 1997

via e-mail:  citation@ao.uscourts.gov

Dear Members of the U.S. Judicial Conference:

     I am writing to urge you to adopt the new citation form.

     There are three parts of my background that are particularly 
relevant to this issue. First, I am an appellate attorney in Los 
Angeles. Second, I have a B.A. and M.A. in economics, and I have 
worked as a professional economist. And third, I am the president of 
CounselWeb, a recently-formed company providing internet services 
like email names, webpages, and discussion groups to attorneys.  
(Incidentally, CounselWeb will not be publishing court opinions.) 
Thus, I am writing from the perspective of a practicing lawyer with 
an interest and background in economics and the internet.

     Court opinions are public records. Yet under the current rules, 
attorneys may not cite court opinions in the form they are issued by 
the courts. Instead, the courts require all citations to be to 
official or unofficial reporters, all of which are published by 
private companies. This produces a guaranteed market, and high 
guaranteed profits, for these companies.

     Perhaps this system made sense in an era where books were the 
primarily means of distributing information like court opinions. The 
costs of printing, binding, distributing, and storing books are 
substantial. Since someone had to bear these costs, it was reasonably 
to expect court users -- attorneys, and indirectly their clients -- 
to pay for part of these costs.  Also, since there were real 
efficiencies in using bound reporters rather than slip opinions 
themselves, mandating citations to reporters made economic sense.

     All of this has changed. Computer technology, low-cost high-
speed storage media, and internet have made it inexpensive and simple 
to store opinions on a computer and make them widely available to the 
public. Given this, the costs of publishing, storing, and 
distributing this information have plummented, and hence there is no 
longer a justification for mandatory case citations to private 
companies' reporters.

     These companies still have an important role to play. Case 
summaries, digests, and indexes all have an important role to play, 
as do the books themselves and the sophisticated computer search 
engines on Westlaw and Lexis.  But these companies, like virtually 
every other company in the economy, should have to compete for 
customers on the basis of the price and quality of their products, 
unassisted by a government mandate for their services.

     I strongly urge you to adopt the paragraph citation proposal.

Sincerely yours,

Bruce Adelstein