Charles R. Fulbruge III
Clerk
United States Court of Appeals
For the Fifth Circuit
March 7, 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
In August 1996, the American Bar Association (ABA) approved a
resolution made by its Special Committee on Citation Issues calling
for state and federal courts to develop a standard citation system
and recommending a format that could be used by state and federal
courts. That resolution would require courts to identify the citation
on each decision at the time the decision is made available to the
public. The standard form of citation, for a decision in a federal
court of appeals, should include the year of the decision, the court,
the decision number, the paragraph number where the material referred
to is located and the parallel citation.
This office opposes the ABA resolution. We see no need to
introduce a new sequential decision number into the operations of
this court. To create the ABA proposed "standard" form of citation
would require additional work at several levels. Initially, we would
have to:
1. Devise and coordinate with our judges a means for assigning
the sequential decision numbers;
2. Create or modify existing AIMS events for the decision number
to be included in the AIMS database;
3. Devise a means of answering inquiries from the public seeking
information on the new decision number assigned;
4. Create and maintain a permanent cross reference between the
docket number and the opinion number;
5. Train employees to answer inquiries from the Court and the
bar on the newly established procedures.
Several of the above tasks would also have to be preformed in a
daily basis. We estimate an opinion clerk would have to spend an
additional five minutes per opinion to assign a decision number and
docket the appropriate information in AIMS. We also estimate another
five minutes per opinion for the authoring judge's staff to number
the paragraphs of the opinions. Our biggest concern is the time
clerk's office personnel will spend answering inquiries from the
public regarding gaps in decision numbers, if for example an opinion
is withdrawn, requesting citations, and requesting the full case
information when all they have available is a citation.
Now that virtually all the circuit courts' opinions are
available on the Internet, there is a great public access to the
court's decisions. At least in this court, our opinions are
identifiable by case number, court and date of decision,, e.g. Smith
v. Jones, No. 97-10113 (5th Cir. Mar. 7, 1997). We question why we
would want to invest time and money in the ABA proposed form, when it
imposes a burden on this court with no perceptible benefit.
!NR
Sincerely,
Charles R. Fulbruge III