Subject: Comment on Official Citation Format Date: Fri, 14 Mar 1997 14:09:33 MDT From: "KATHY CARLSON" Organization: WYOMING STATE LIBRARY To: citation@teo.uscourts.gov Kathy Carlson Wyoming State Law Librarian supreme Court Building 2301 Capitol Avenue Cheyenne, Wyoming 82002 ABA Citation Resolution Suite 4-512 Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts Washington, DC 20544 via Internet: citation@ao.uscourts.gov March 14, 1997 Dear members of the U.S. Judicial Conference: As a librarian whose duties include serving public legal information needs, I write to urge the United States Judicial Conference to adopt a public domain citation for judicial opinions. The Wyoming State Law Library serves as the source of legal information for the Wyoming judicial system, with particular emphasis on insuring the supply of current and relevant materials to the Wyoming Supreme Court. It also serves as a research library for the legislative and administrative branches of state government. The law library directly serves the members of the Wyoming state bar and, through the Wyoming State Library interlibrary loan system, makes legal materials available to persons throughout the state. As the Conference is aware, at present only the United States Supreme Court publishes its own official reporter of court decisions. As a consequence, the citations required by the courts for most federal case law is based upon the page and volume numbers of books sold by West Publishing Company. For years West provided a service which filled a vital need and should be lauded for that service. However, times have changed. Electronic publishing now allows multiple sources to locate case materials and requiring the exclusive use of West's citation system impedes the use of these alternative sources. A system of citation which is based upon the private publishing of opinions in books also has obvious technical limitations in today's world of computers and the Internet. Why wait for a citation until a book is published? How should page numbers be represented on Internet Web pages or on a CD ROM? Clearly it is time to embrace a more modern citation system that is appropriate for the wide range of technologies used to disseminate legal information. Electronic dissemination of information is particularly important in western states like Wyoming. Many of our attorneys live in remote, sparsely populated areas and do not have direct access to a complete law library. There are only two libraries in Wyoming that can currently provide access to the full range of federal primary source materials needed to effectively prepare an action -- The Wyoming State Law Library and the University of Wyoming Law School Library. The two libraries are an inconveniently long distance away for many bar members to visit on a frequent basis. Our libraries provide what assistance we can on a remote basis but often it is not enough. We cannot do attorneys' legal research. Although much of the needed information might be found on commercial legal databases, this is expensive and often cost prohibitive to many small practitioners who deal with relatively small claims. And, there are a great number of small practitioners in rural Wyoming. However, most of these attorneys are now gaining economical access to the Internet. The wealth of official legal information becoming available and searchable on the internet allows these attorneys to effectively access much of the current legal information they need at a more reasonable cost than is provided by the suppliers of the commercial legal databases. It would improve work efficiency and be beneficial to all if a citation could be made directly from these sources rather than to have to take the time to locate the needed resources to convert to the West citations currently required by the court. These research cost savings could be passed on to the clients and in the form of reduced legal fees and, in the end, improve the access to effective justice for many people. And, although not always viewed as wise, each individual has the right to prepare and present his/her own legal actions. In our library, we are seeing more and more pro se litigants. Having a uniform citation not based on the West system benefits these individuals as well. As with the attorneys, many citizens in Wyoming do not have direct access to a fully supplied law library. Most are, however, gaining access to the legal information on the Internet either at home or through their county libraries. It would be just as beneficial to these researchers to have a citation format they could use straight off of the Internet. It would be easy enough for the entity posting the decisions to do a citation format information page to illustrate what would be needed in the way of a citation for legal documents. This would actually seem to make the whole federal justice system more accessible to people doing their own legal work. In addition, West Publishing claims that it actually owns the citations to federal court opinions and is currently pursuing these claims in copyright suits in New York and Minnesota. In the recent merger between West Publishing and Thomson, the Department of Justice approved a compulsory license for the citations. This license spells out the cost of the West monopoly. Rival publishers and non-profit publisher must pay fees which escalate to about 9 cents per 1,000 characters, per "product" per year, to use the West citation. In practical terms, this means a publisher has to pay from $1 to $3 or even more to publish a single federal court opinion in usable form. These fees must be paid every year to West Publishing. If a publisher has both a CD-ROM product and an online product, it has to pay twice -- once for each product. The Conference must recognize that the continued requirement that copyrighted citations be provided to the federal courts in legal documents may block others from entering the market to provide usable case law. It is virtually impossible for a potential competitor to enter the market and produce a viable product when the Courts require the use of citations tied to commercially produced products, the use of which must be licensed. In a system of free enterprise, this actually provides a free government benefit to one commercial entity over another. The West copyright claims on citations, and the courts' de facto requirement that West citations be used has caused another troubling situation. Law schools and others provide some federal case law on the Internet to the public without charge, but its use is significantly impaired because it cannot be cited. Moreover, the lack of a public means of citation retards more widespread Internet availability of the case law. The idea that any private company could "own" something as basic as the citations to court opinions is troublesome. Respect for the law is based upon the notion that the law is essentially democratic and civic, not the domain of private interests. I believe that the courts should provide a public means of citation. Absent doing so the courts effectively mandate use of a private company's product to access and use documents produced at public expense. There is now broad public support for the notion that government bodies should use the Internet to enhance the public's access to public documents. This is important for everyone, not only for practicing lawyers or legal scholars. Yet the courts continued reliance on a private company to provide the citations to make case law usable blocks full use of the case law currently available to the public for free. I recognize that judges and court employees will have to expend some effort to number court opinions, and to number the paragraphs of opinions. This should not be a significant burden for the court since much of the numbering can be done with a few keystrokes in current word processing systems. The benefits to the public clearly warrant such efforts. Indeed, in evaluating this proposal the court should also consider the beneficial impact greater competition would have on the courts' own costs in obtaining citable case law. For these reasons, I urge the Judicial Conference to adopt a system of public domain citations for court opinions. Sincerely, Kathy Carlson Wyoming State Law Librarian