HENRY M. JASNY, ESQ
                         402 Jackson Street
                    Falls Church, Virginia 22046

                                   March 13, 1997

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

                     Re: ABA Citation Resolution
               Committee on Automation and Technology
                62 Fed. Reg. 8,037, February 21, 1997

     I am submitting this statement in response to the request of the 
Judicial Conference of the United States for public comment on the 
American Bar Association (ABA) uniform citation resolution. I am an 
attorney engaged in the active practice of law in the District of 
Columbia. I have 20 years experience in the practice of law and, 
while my main practice is in the federal court system, I have 
litigated cases in both federal and state courts, having filed 
hundreds of briefs and memoranda of law. The cases I have argued have 
been published in both court and private reporting systems.

     In my practice I regularly use the privately published reporter 
systems which is all but invariably a requirement in most 
jurisdictions. However, since the advent of electronic reporter 
services, reliance on bound paper reporter services alone is not 
sufficient to assure that all recent precedent have been reviewed. In 
order to obtain up-to-date case reports I must access expensive on-
line services that provide the most recent, available court decisions 
not available through traditional or alternative research methods.

     As important, the current reporting system and the present 
citation conventions require attorneys co rely on expensive services, 
whether on-line or in published volumes, that are no longer the 
optimal means for legal research nor the least expensive alternative. 
These arbitrary constraints prevent sole practitioners, small law 
firms, and organizations with limited resources from reducing their 
own costs and the cost of legal research and litigation to their 
clients and the public. The veritable monopoly on legal information 
which this practice creates also inhibits the free flow of legal 
information and ready public access to judicial decisions which are 
in fact public documents.

     In my view, the ABA resolution on a uniform citation system 
would solve these problems at almost no cost or effort. The required 
sequential numbering of decisions and the paragraphs in an opinion 
are minor inconveniences that court personnel can adapt to with 
little effort. This is a de minimis price to pay in order to vastly 
improve the legal reporting system and reduce research costs for 
attorneys and the public in general.

     WHEREFORE, I request that the above relief be granted and that 
the Judicial Conference of the United States adopt and implement the 
ABA proposal for a uniform citation for all federal courts. 

Respectfully submitted,

Henry M. Jasny