TAX ANALYSTS
                       6830 N. Fairfax Drive,
                      Arlington, Virginia 22213
                           (703) 533-4400

                                   March 14, 1997 
 
ABA Citation Resolution 
U.S. Judicial Conference 
Washington, D.C. 
 
     For three generations, the courts of the United States have had 
a semi-official printer, the West Publishing Company. 
 
     For many years, this system worked well. West produced court 
decisions in an orderly format at no cost to the Federal government. 
And the courts provided their opinions to West and cooperated in a 
variety of other ways to facilitate that Company's publication 
efforts. No one questioned the system, and most members of the bar 
accepted West's semi-official status. 
 
     However, in the past decade, this cozy system has begun to break 
down. The computer revolution brought new firms and new types of 
publications into legal publishing. These included giant firms, such 
as Lexis-Nexis, and small CD-ROM publishers, such as Hyperlaw, New 
Ray Software, Tax Analysts. 
 
     These new entrants -- especially the CD-ROM publishers -- 
brought with them the prospect of lower prices and broader 
availability for legal reference materials. But the efforts of these 
new entrants have been largely thwarted by West Publishing's control 
over the citation system used to identify judicial decisions, 
 
     This control has been asserted by West in a series of lawsuits 
over the past decade, and through an intensified effort by West to 
curry favor with Federal and state courts by a variety of means. See, 
for example, "U.S. Justices Took Trips from West Publishing," 
Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 5, 1995, p. 1. The most recent 
instance of such efforts is the gift by Dwight Opperman of West to 
New York University Law School's Global Law Program for the benefit 
of the children of West employees and Article III Federal judges. 
 
     The American Bar Association (ABA) has recently endorsed, by an 
overwhelming majority, a proposal to develop a new public-domain 
citation system that will replace the system over which West asserts 
proprietary rights. The ABA proposal deserves support by the U.S. 
Judicial Conference. 
 
     The ABA proposal will undoubtedly foster competition in legal 
publishing and thereby lower the prices charged by publishers for 
legal texts. 
 
     At the same time, the ABA proposal will enable the courts to 
make their opinions immediately available by electronic means with a 
permanent citation. Thus, instead of waiting weeks or months for a 
print citation to be assigned to a case, the courts themselves can 
assign a citation that can thereafter be used by all publishers, 
large and small, to identify cases. 
 
     In the past, the courts have been slow to respond to the 
challenges and opportunities attributable to development of computer 
technology and the Internet. I have been outspoken in urging the 
courts to do better. See, for example, "Judicial Information Policy: 
Whose Business Is It Anyway," reprinted in the Proceedings of the 
National Conference on Legal Information Issues, (American 
Association of Law Libraries Series No, 51), Fred B. Rothman & Co., 
Littleton, Colorado, 1996. 
 
     The ABA citation proposal is an opportunity for the courts to 
begin to assert leadership in an important area that has been too 
long neglected. The time for study and debate is past. The problems 
in this area -- especially the competing claims of West and its 
competitors -- have festered too long and have grown serious. The 
courts need to assert their rightful role in helping to make the law 
available to the public. Adoption of the ABA citation proposal would 
be an important step in that direction. 
 
                                   Best regards, 
 
                                   Thomas F. Field 
                                   President and Publisher