Author:   "Peter D. Junger"

Date:     3/12/03:18 pm

Priority: Normal

BCC:      Citation at AO-OCPPO

TO:       citation@ao.uscourts.gov at ~ Internet

Subject:  Support for ABA Citation Resolution


Appellate Court and Circuit Administration Division
ATTN: ABA Citation Resolution
Suite 4-512
Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts
Washington, D.C. 20544

Sirs:

     I am a professor of law at Case Western Reserve University in 
Cleveland, Ohio. I am writing to express my strong support for the 
form of official citation for court decisions recommended by the ABA 
Citation Resolution.

     I am one of those fortunate ones who have unlimited access to 
the Lexis and Westlaw online databases of judicial opinions and I 
also have access to a quite extensive legal library at CWRU Law 
School, so I am not personally at a disadvantage because of lack of 
access to the law. On the other hand, I fear that my access to those 
legal databases has been given to me -- or, rather, made available to 
the Law School faculty and students at a substantial price to the Law 
School, even if that price is greatly discounted -- in the hope that 
I will, like a dope peddler giving away samples, get my students 
addicted to expensive ways of doing legal research.

     It may be hard for a judge or a law professor, with "free" 
access to these legal data bases, to understand how costly -- in 
both time and money -- our present system of legal citations is to 
solo practitioners and small firms, and to members of the public, 
when each citation must refer to a page number that a legal publisher 
claims as its private property. I do know, however, that many 
smaller law firms complain bitterly that we are teaching our students 
expensive research habits that makes them too costly to hire when 
they finally graduate and go looking for a job. And I am aware that 
much legal research that is done is done today is done badly, at 
least in part because the researchers do not have inexpensive access 
to the law reports.

     It may also be hard for lawyers, judges, and law professors to 
understand how much desire there is on the part of the public for 
access to judicial opinions. But as a law teacher who is an active 
participant in a fair number of internet discussion groups on 
subjects as divergent as Medieval History, Free Speech, and Buddhism, 
it is my experience that there is a large demand by members of the 
public for access to judicial opinions that cannot easily be 
satisfied under our present system.

     Many of the problems that I am discussing here could be 
alleviated if judicial opinions, and especially those of our most 
important courts, were available on inexpensive CDroms or for free on 
the World wide Web. And such resources are increasingly becoming 
available. (For an example of some the legal databases that are 
available on the World Wide Web you might want to look at the 
following URL on my web server: <http://samsara.law-
cwru.edu/links/glm.html#glm>.) But, these new resources will never be 
satisfactory so long as they cannot contain the full information that 
is needed if one is to cite a portion of one the opinions that they 
contain.

     All that is necessary to resolve this difficulty, at least for 
future opinions, is the adoption of the ABA's proposed citation 
system.

     It would seem that the cost of adopting the ABA's proposal would 
be minimal. It should be easy to write software programs that could 
number paragraphs automatically, so that the process would be 
transparent to those judges who do not want themselves or their 
clerks to be troubled by such matters. I certainly am not a serious 
programmer, but I think that I could write a perl script that would 
do that.

     And the benefits would be substantial, not only by making the 
sources of the law available to the public, but also by freeing the 
text of judicial opinions from the constraints imposed upon them by 
the technology of the traditional printing press. Paragraphs are 
natural divisions of a text; pages, on the other hand, are arbitrary 
divisions imposed by the limitations of a particular press. In the 
coming age, when more and more information, including judicial 
opinions, will be stored in electronic form and only printed out when 
there is a demand, something like the ABA proposal will be an 
absolute necessity. And the sooner the proposal is adopted the 
better off we will all be.

                                   Respectfully submitted,

                                   Peter D. Junger
                                   Professor of Law