I’ve been reading this week about the birth, death, and possible rebirth of the vendor-neutral citation movement. Proponents believe that neutral citation of judicial opinions in a free web environment will support equal access to justice by putting more legal information into the hands of all lawyers and the public. Without neutral citation, litigants and their attorneys have to consult the commercial Thomson West Reporter System to find proper page references within a cited case in order to comply with court filing requirements.
Peter Martin examined the movement’s progress, or lack thereof, in “Neutral Citation, Court Web Sites, and Access to Authoritative Case Law” in the Spring 2007 issue of Law Library Journal. Martin lamented that the neutral citation system has lost steam of late. The movement emerged in the mid-1990s, with strong support from both the ABA and the AALL. Several states, including my current state of Oklahoma, adopted neutral citation systems that rely on paragraph numbers instead of page numbers as referents. Martin cites several factors for why interest in these systems has waned. Judicial opposition based on the unknowns of the mid-1990s internet, the emergence of free online legal research services for bar members, and loss of interest by the ABA and AALL are among them (Martin 2007,¶44 et seq.).
Ian Gallacher (Syracuse University College of Law) also addresses these points in his article, “Cite Unseen: How Neutral Citation and America’s Law Schools Can Cure Our Strange Devotion to Bibliographical Orthodoxy and the Constriction of Open and Equal Access to the Law” (70 Alb. L. Rev. 491). Gallagher believes that American law schools should take the lead and bring the neutral citation movement back to life. It would not be a small undertaking, but the pioneering efforts of Cornell’s Legal Information Institute and other initiatives suggest that a collaborative venture along these lines could bear fruit.
A lot has changed in the several years since this issue was last seriously considered. More research is done online now than in the reporters section of the law library. It was once unthinkable that a large, prestigious law firm library would send its reporters to offsite storage, but the practice is common now that law lives so comfortably on the internet. The question of why a system based on print pagination is still the only way to cite in most courts may be ripe for revisiting. Authentication of legal information on the web is a related issue that’s not addressed in either of these articles, but stay tuned to Law Librations for more on that topic soon.
