Archive for the ‘Cases’ Category

Lessons the Federal Courts Might Learn from Westlaw’s Prolonged Data Processing Error

Friday, May 6th, 2016

The Thomson Reuters Errata Notice

On April 15, 2016 Thomson Reuters notified subscribers to its online and print case law services that a significant number of U.S. decisions it had published since November 2014 contained errors.

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Here and there words had been dropped.  The company explained that the errors had been introduced by software run on the electronic texts it collected from the authoring courts.  Thomson posted a list of the affected cases.  The initial list contained some 600 casesA week later it had grown to over 2,500 through the addition of cases loaded on Westlaw but not published in the National Reporter Service (NRS).  Two weeks out the list included links to corrected versions of the affected cases with the restored language highlighted.  The process of making the corrections led Thomson to revise the number of casualties downward (See the list’s entry for U.S. v. Ganias, for example.), but only slightly.

Thomson Reuters sought to minimize the importance of this event, asserting that none of the errors “changed the meaning of the law in the case.”  Commendably, Thomson apologized, acknowledging and detailing the errata.  It spun its handling of the processing error’s discovery as a demonstration of the company’s commitment to transparency.  On closer analysis the episode reveals major defects in the current system for disseminating federal case law (and the case law of those states that, like the lower federal courts, leave key elements of the process to Thomson Reuters).

Failure to View Case Law Publication as a Public Function

Neither the U.S. Courts of Appeals nor the U.S. District Courts have an “official publisher.”  No reporter’s office or similar public agency produces and stamps its seal on consistently formatted, final, citable versions of the judicial opinions rendered by those courts in the way the Reporter of Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court does for the nation’s highest court.  By default, cemented in by over a century of market dominance and professional practice, that job has fallen to a single commercial firm (originally the West Publishing Company, now by acquisition and merger Thomson Reuters) to gather and publish the decisions of those courts in canonical form.  Although that situation arose during the years in which print was the sole or principal medium of distribution, it has carried over into the digital era.  Failure of the federal judiciary to adopt and implement a system of non-proprietary, medium-neutral citation has allowed it to happen.

With varying degrees of effectiveness, individual court web sites do as they were mandated by Congress in the E-Government Act of 2002.  They provide electronic access to the court’s decisions as they are released.  The online decision files, spread across over one hundred sites, present opinion texts in a diversity of formats.  Crucially, all lack the citation data needed by any legal professional wishing to refer to a particular opinion or passage within it.  Nearly twenty years ago the American Bar Association called upon the nation’s courts to assume the task of assigning citations.  By now the judiciaries in close to one-third of the states have done so.  The federal courts have not.

Major Failings of the Federal Courts’ Existing Approach

Delivery of Decisions with PDF Pagination to Systems that Must Remove It

Several states, including a number that produce large volumes of appellate decisions, placed no cases on the Thomson Reuters errata list.  Conspicuous by their absence, for example, are decisions from the courts of California and New York.  The company’s identification of the software bug combined with inspection of the corrected documents explains why.  Wrote Thomson it all began with an “upgrade to our PDF conversion process.”

The lower federal courts, like those of many states, release their decisions to Thomson Reuters, other redistributors, and the public as PDF files.  The page breaks in these “slip opinion” PDFs have absolutely no enduring value.  Thomson (like Lexis, Bloomberg Law, Casemaker, FastCase, Google Scholar, Ravel Law, and the rest) must remove opinion texts from this electronic delivery package and pull together paragraphs and footnotes that straddle PDF pages.  All the words dropped by Thomson’s “PDF conversion process” were proximate to slip opinion page breaks.  Why are there no California and New York cases on list?  Those states release appellate decisions in less rigid document formats.  California decisions are available in Microsoft Word format as well as PDF.  The New York Law Reporting Bureau releases decisions in htmlSo does Oklahoma; no Oklahoma decisions appear on the Thomson errata list.

Failure to Employ One Consistent Format

The lower federal courts compound the PDF extraction challenge by employing no single consistent format.  Leaving individual judges of the ninety-four district courts to one side, the U.S. Courts of Appeals inflict a range of remarkably different styles on those commercial entities and non-profits that must process their decisions so that they will scroll and present text, footnotes, and interior divisions on the screens of computers, tablets, and phones with reasonable efficiency and consistency.  The Second Circuit’s format features double-spaced texts, numbered lines, and bifurcated footnotes; the Seventh Circuit’s has single-spaced lines, unnumbered, with very few footnotes (none in opinions by Judge Posner).

In contrast the decisions released by the Michigan Supreme Court, although embedded in PDF, reflect a cleanly consistent template.  The same is true of those coming from the supreme courts of Florida, Texas, and Wisconsin.  Decisions from these states do not appear on the Thomson list.

Lack of a Readily Accessible, Authenticated Archive of the Official Version

By its own account it took Thomson Reuters over a year to discover this data processing problem.  With human proofreaders it would not have taken so long.  Patently, they are no longer part of the company’s publication process.  Some of the omitted words would have been invisible to anyone or any software not performing a word-for-word comparison between the decision released by the court and the Westlaw/National Reporter Service version.  Dropping “So ordered” from the end of an opinion or the word “Plaintiff” prior to the party’s name at its beginning fall in this category.  However, the vast majority of the omissions rendered the affected sentence or sentences unintelligible.  At least one removed part of a web site URLOthers dropped citations.  In the case of a number of state courts, a reader perplexed by a commercial service’s version of a decision can readily retrieve an official copy of the opinion text from a public site and compare its language.  That is true, for example, in Illinois.  Anyone reading the 2015 Illinois Supreme Court decision in People v. Smith on Westlaw puzzled by the sentence “¶ 3 The defendant, Mickey D. Smith, was charged in a three-count indictment lawful justification and with intent to cause great bodily harm, shot White in the back with a handgun thereby causing his death.” could have pulled the original, official opinion from the judiciary web site simply by employing a Google search and the decision’s court attached citation (2015 IL 116572), scrolled directly to paragraph 3, and discovered the Westlaw error.  The same holds for the other six published Illinois decisions on the Thomson list.  Since New Mexico also posts final, official versions of its decisions outfitted with public domain citations, it, too, provides a straightforward way for users of Westlaw or any other commercial service to check the accuracy of dubious case data.

The growing digital repository of federal court decisions on the GPO’s FDsys site falls short of the standard set by these state examples.  To begin, it is seriously incomplete.  Over fifty of the entries on the Thomson Reuters list are decisions from the Southern District of New York, a court not yet included in FDsys.  Moreover, since the federal courts employ no system of court applied citation, there is no simple way to retrieve a specific decision from FDsys or to move directly to a puzzling passage within it.  With an unusual party name or docket number the FDsys search utility may prove effective but with a case name like “U.S. v. White” retrieval is a challenge.  A unique citation would make the process far less cumbersome.  However, since the lower federal courts rely on Thomson Reuters to attach enduring citations to their cases (in the form of volume and page numbers in its commercial publications) the texts flow into FDsys without them.

The Ripple of the Thomson Reuters Errors into Other Database Systems

Because the federal courts have allowed the citation data assigned by Thomson Reuters, including the location of interior page breaks, to remain the de facto citation standard for U.S. lawyers and judges, all other publishers are compelled in some degree to draw upon the National Reporter System.  They cannot simply work from the texts released by their deciding courts, but must, once a case has received Thomson editorial treatment and citation assignment, secure at least some of what Thomson has added.  That introduces both unnecessary expense and a second point of data vulnerability to case law dissemination.  Possible approaches range from: (a) extracting only the volume and pagination from the Thomson reports (print or electronic) and inserting that data in the version of the decision released by the court to (b) replacing the court’s original version with a full digital copy of the NRS version.  Whether the other publisher acquires the Thomson Reuters data in electronic form under license or by redigitizing the NRS print reports, the second approach will inevitably pick up errors injected by Thomson Reuters editors and software.  For that reason the recent episode illuminates how the various online research services assemble case data.

Services Unaffected by the Thomson Reuters Glitch

Lexis was not affected by the Thomson Reuters errors because it does not draw decision texts from the National Reporter System.  (That is not to say that Lexis is not capable of committing similar processing errors of its own.  See the first paragraph in the Lexis version of U.S. Ravensberg, 776 f.3d 587 (7th Cir. 2015).)   So that Lexis subscribers can cite opinions using the volume and page numbers assigned by Thomson, Lexis extracts them from the NRS reports and inserts them in the original text.  In other respects, however, it does not conform decision data to that found in Westlaw.  As explained elsewhere its approach is revealed in how the service treats cases that contain internal cross-references.  In the federal courts and other jurisdictions still using print-based citation, a dissenting judge referring to a portion of the majority opinion must use “slip opinion” pagination.  Later when published by Thomson Reuters these “ante at” references are converted by the company’s editors, software, or some combination of the two to the pagination of the volume in which the case appears.  Search recent U.S. Court of Appeals decision on Lexis on the phrase “ante at” and you will discover that in its system they remain in their original “slip opinion” form.  For a single example, compare Judge Garza’s dissenting opinion in In re Deepwater Horizon, 739 F.3d 790 (5th Cir. 2014) as it appears on Lexis with the version on Westlaw or in the pages of the Federal Reporter.

Bloomberg Law appears to draw more extensively on the NRS version of a decision.  Its version of the Garza dissent in In re Deepwater Horizon expresses the cross references in Federal Reporter pagination.  However, like Lexis it does not replace the original “slip opinions” with the versions appearing in the pages of the Federal Reporter.  Examination of a sample of the cases Thomson Reuters has identified as flawed finds that Bloomberg Law, like Lexis, has the dropped language.  Casemaker does as well.

Services that Copy Directly from Thomson’s Reports, Errors and All

In contrast, Fastcase, Google Scholar, and Ravel Law all appear to replace “slip opinions” with digitized texts drawn from the National Reporter System.  As a consequence when Thomson Reuters drops words or makes other changes in an original opinion text so do they.  The Westlaw errors are still to be found in the case data of these other services.

Might FDsys Provide a Solution?

fdsys

Since 2011 decisions from a growing number of federal courts have been collected, authenticated, and digitally stored in their original format as part of the GPO’s FDsys program.  As noted earlier that data gathering is still seriously incomplete.  Furthermore, the GPO role is currently limited to authenticating decision files and adding a very modest set of metadata.  Adding decision identifiers designed to facilitate retrieval of individual cases, ideally designations consistent with emerging norms of medium-neutral citation, would be an enormously useful extension of that role.  So would be the assignment of paragraph numbers throughout decision texts, but regrettably that task properly belongs at the source.  It is time for the Judicial Conference of the United States to revisit vendor and medium neutral citation.

Citation Software

Monday, January 4th, 2016

Citations and Software – A Long and Vexed Relationship

Hat tip to the team responsible for Blueline (http://blueline.blue/), who suggested a post on the love-hate relationship between programmers and The Bluebook.

They have discovered, as others have before, how challenging it is to create software that will identify all the legal citations in a document and do something to or with them. The trail, dotted with patents and patent applications, is a long one, stretching back to the 1980s when a pair of Harvard Law School grads established a software enterprise they called Jurisoft. By 1986 Jurisoft’s offerings included CiteRite, list price $395, very likely the first successful PC program focused on the professional rather than business side of law practice. CiteRite would scan a brief for citations and generate a report enumerating all failures to conform to Bluebook format. In short order, Jurisoft was acquired by the parent company of Lexis. By 1990 the Jurisoft line included a companion program named FullAuthority, which to quote one reviewer had the “smarts” to do the following:

All you have to do with FullAuthority is tell it the name of the text file on your computer that contains the legal citations. It will zip through your document, tracking each legal citation like a bloodhound. When it has rounded them all up, it will organize them into groups. These groups may include cases (with separate categories for state and federal cases), statutes (with separate categories for state and federal statutes) and other authorities.

Together CiteRite II and FullAuthority comprised Jurisoft’s Citation Toolbox.  Their system requirements are a stark reminder of the computer environment of the early 1990’s:

IBM PC or compatible, MS-DOS 2.0 or higher, 250 kilobytes available memory, hard disk recommended

In the early 1990s both major online providers were moving toward hyperlinking some of the citations that appeared in their collections of judicial opinions, which, of course, required them (and all subsequent competitors) to have sophisticated inhouse tools for identifying and manipulating citations.

In time Word replaced WordPerfect as lawyers’ preferred word processing software and Dakota Legal Software brought out a Word add-on designed to compete with the Jurisoft programs. Lexis acquired its technology as well and folded it into the company’s Lexis for Microsoft Office. Today, that package, like the comparable Drafting Assistant from Westlaw, performs cite-checking, quote-checking, and citation linking in addition to format review and table of authorities compilation.

Both major vendors also have, included as part of their latest generation systems, a copy-with-citation feature purporting to furnish a properly formatted citation (in any one of numerous formats including the distinctive non-Bluebook variants employed in California. Michigan, and New York).  They were reviewed in an earlier post.

Citation tools operating outside and apart from Westlaw and Lexis continued to appear. Although maintenance of the CiteIt! software appears to have ended over a decade ago, the product’s features are still on display at: http://www.sidebarsoft.com/. Another product, CiteGenie, held its ground until WestlawNext’s copy-with-citation feature effectively supplanted it. And, for a time, Jureeka! offered those reading citation-filled documents on the open Web a browser add-on that would converted plain text citations into links. Now along comes Blueline.

Some Reasons for Programmers to Love The Bluebook

Whether designed to review a document for citation format compliance, to check a citator for authority undercutting cited decisions, or to compile a table of authorities, verify the accuracy of a quotation, or generate a link, citation software must first identify which of the diverse character strings found as it scans a document constitute citations and not addresses, part numbers, or radio station call letters. If citation format were uniform across the United States, if judges in federal and state courts and the lawyers submitting documents to them conformed their citations of authority to a common standard presented in a consistent format, the job would be an easy one. The Bluebook, with its claim to offer “a uniform system of citation” (a phrase its proprietors have trademarked), purports to be just that. And so it is within the universe of academic law journals. Complex though it may be, to the extent that the citations in U.S. law writing conform to The Bluebook the programmer’s job is relatively straightforward. To the chagrin of those attempting to construct citation-identifying algorithms, however, courts in the fifty U.S. states have quite diverse ideas about citation norms. Often they are focused narrowly on the legal authorities most frequently cited in cases coming before them. The Bluebook specifies that Indiana Code sections be cited in the format “Ind. Code § x-x-x-x” and those of the Idaho Code as “Idaho Code § x-x”, but when judges and lawyers in Indiana cite code provisions to one another they often cite to I.C. § x-x-x-x; just as those in Idaho cite to I.C. § x-x. Generally, the federal courts and those practicing before them take a less parochial view when citing state authorities, but they are far from consistent on some very basic points. The Bluebook has it that a provision in the Code of Federal Regulations should be cited: “x C.F.R. § xxx.xx (year)”. The U.S. Supreme Court favors “x CFR § xxx.xx” (no periods, no date) but is not followed on this point by most lower federal courts. (Those at Blueline claim their citation analysis suggests “that Republican appointed judges typically cite the U.S. Code as ‘USC’, whereas Democrat appointees prefer ‘U.S.C.'”) Approaches to compressing party names and citing treatises are all over the place.  The same holds for abbreviations of the several sets of federal procedural rules as cited in briefs and court opinions.

A citation reform movement of the last two decades has called for courts to break away from print-dependent case identifiers through the attachment of vendor and medium neutral citations to their decisions prior to release. Building on recommendations of the ABA, the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) prepared a detailed implementation manual. It carries the title AALL Universal Citation Guide and provides a modern blueprint for uniformity. No surprise, several of the states adopting the new approach have deviated substantially from it. How does The Bluebook address the resulting lack of uniformity? Its Rule 10.3.3 instructs that “the requirements of the jurisdiction’s format should be observed.”

As the folks at Blueline put it “the approved and unapproved variations in Bluebook style create a huge hurdle for coders who rely on hard and fast rules.”  Weak force though it may be, The Bluebook does offer a template for citation recognition on which programmers can begin to build. Deviations from its “uniform system” can be then treated as special cases or alternatives.

Grounds for Programmer Frustration with The Bluebook

Were all judges and lawyers to follow The Bluebook meticulously, would programmers be satisfied? Not so long as its citation rules remain stuck in print-era conventions. Volume and page number are far less precise than “2015 IL 117090, ¶ 31” which points to a single paragraph (straddling a page-break) in a uniquely identified decision of the Illinois Supreme Court. Decided this past January, the decision only later received volume number and pagination in the National Reporter System. Yet The Bluebook directs the passage in question be cited by the latter formula (unnecessary, delayed, and less exact). Page numbers can even yield ambiguous results. A Blueline communique reports that “a query intended for Peate v. McCann, 294 F.3d 879 (7th Cir. 2002) accidentally pulled McCaskill v. Sci Management Corp., 294 F.3d 879 (7th Cir. 2002) because the latter opinion was only 44 words long.”

The Bluebook‘s deference to the major online services, particularly when dealing with the increasingly large pool of “unpublished” decisions, is another problem. A single decision is known as “2015 BL 377979” on Bloomberg Law, “2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 155224” on Lexis, and “2015 WL 7253819”.  Google Scholar and other public access sites have the decision but don’t know it by any of those designations. No citation parser can establish the identity of those references or match any of them to a non-proprietary version of the case. Situated as it is in the academy, a domain handsomely served by the major commercial systems, The Bluebook fails to address this problem adequately, and its deference to the commercial sector leads to a strong bias in favor of publisher-specific citations.

That same bias combined with The Bluebook‘s continuing attachment to print leads to rules for statutory and treatise citations that are not followed uniformly because in the current practice environment they simply cannot be.

(internal quotation marks omitted)

Thursday, November 5th, 2015

The Bluebook Change

Hat tip to Eva Resnicow, aka Editrix Lex, who brought this Bluebook change to my attention.

Since the eighteenth edition, The Bluebook has included “(internal quotation marks omitted)” among the parenthetical expressions listed in Rule 5.2. That is The Bluebook rule addressing the broader question of how to signal any number of alterations a writer might make to a quoted passage. Similar parenthetical notices to be appended to citations as appropriate include “(emphasis added)” and “(citations omitted).” Prior to this year’s twentieth edition, The Bluebook itself provided no guidance on when a writer could or should omit internal quotation marks. It merely specified how to report their removal. However, a “Blue Tip” posted to The Bluebook site in 2010 addressed the “when to omit” question. In essence it called for the omission of internal quotation marks whenever the primary quoted material consisted entirely of an embedded quotation. “In all other cases,” the tip advised, “include all internal quotation marks.”

Although less clearly expressed, the twentieth edition has added comparable directions on when to omit internal quotation marks to The Bluebook proper. At the same time, it has removed the “(internal quotation marks omitted)” parenthetical from Rule 5.2’s roster. There is no ban on its use. The phrase has simply been deleted from 5.2, presumably, on the ground that it is unnecessary. Added to 5.2 is a new paragraph (f)(iii) which directs (as Bluebook editions reaching back as far as the fourteenth have advised) that a parenthetical identifying the source of the embedded quote be appended to the citation of the passage in which it appears. Arguably, that identification of underlying source provides adequate notice that the quotation is derivative. The revised rule is also as emphatic as the Blue Tip was before that interior quotation marks should be retained in any case where the embedded quote makes up less than the entirety of the primary quoted passage.

An Illustration of the New Rule’s Effect

A note published this past June in the Harvard Law Review contains the following passage, footnoted as shown:

Expansive though it is, the President’s enforcement discretion is not limitless. In the OLC’s analysis, legal constraints on nonenforcement derive ultimately from the Take Care Clause24 and are spelled out in a series of judicial opinions following a focal 1985 case, Heckler v. Chaney.25 The Opinion interprets this case law as standing for four general principles: (1) enforcement decisions must reflect “factors which are peculiarly within [agency] expertise”;26 (2) enforcement actions must be “consonant with … the congressional policy underlying the [governing] statutes”;27 (3) the executive cannot “‘consciously and expressly adopt[] a general policy’ that is so extreme as to amount to an abdication of its statutory responsibilities”;28 and (4) “nonenforcement decisions are most comfortably characterized as judicially unreviewable exercises of enforcement discretion when they are made on a case-by-case basis.”29


24. See id. at 4 (locating the President’s enforcement discretion in his constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” (quoting U.S. Const. art. II, § 3) (internal quotation marks omitted)).
26. The Opinion, supra note 3, at 6 (quoting Chaney, 470 U.S. at 831) (internal quotation marks omitted).
28. Id. at 7 (alteration in original) (quoting Chaney, 470 U.S. at 833 n.4) (internal quotation marks omitted).

Had this note been prepared and published under the twentieth edition, the parentheticals appended to notes 24, 26, and 28 would be gone. Observe that the passage appearing in clause (3) includes internal quotation marks. The marks that the author omitted are those showing that the quotation from the Office of Legal Counsel opinion, to which the “Id.” refers, was itself a direct quote from the Chaney decision. The retained marks appear in the quoted Chaney passage and are attributed in it to a D.C. Circuit opinion. (Bluebook Rule 10.6.2 provides that “only one level of ‘quoting’ or ‘citing’ parentheticals is necessary.” Note 28’s failure to identify the source of the embedded quote is, therefore, in compliance. Also in compliance is the parenthical in note 28 reporting that the alteration to the embedded quote appearing in Chaney originated with the Office of Legal Counsel opinion.)

Courts Quoting Themselves Quoting Themselves

Some courts, including the nation’s highest, remove internal quotation marks under circumstances in which the new Rule 5.2 (and the prior Blue Tip) would require their retention. For example, in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992) Justice Blackmun’s dissent cites a prior decision of the Court as follows:.

Cf. Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U. S. 95, 102 (1983) (“Past wrongs were evidence bearing on whether there is a real and immediate threat of repeated injury”) (internal quotation marks omitted).

Id. at 592.

A portion, but only a portion, of the parenthetical quote (“whether there is a real and immediate threat of repeated injury”) was drawn from a still earlier decision of the Court, O’Shea v. Littleton, 414 U. S. 488 (1974). Per The Bluebook, that quote within a quote should have been wrapped in single quotation marks. However, this is judicial writing, not a journal article. Judges may well consider it far less important to separate out exactly which language quoted from a past opinion of their own court was in turn recycled from a prior one. They are likely, however, The Bluebook notwithstanding, to continue to feel an obligation to note the occurrence of such reuse with an “internal quotation marks omitted” parenthetical.

Courts Quoting Themselves Quoting Other Sources

The situation is markedly different when one judicial opinion quotes a prior one that rests on constitutional or statutory language. Being absolutely clear about that dependency argues for retaining the interior quotation marks, even when The Bluebook would trim them. Justice Thomas, dissenting in a 2015 case, Elonis v. U.S., 135 S. Ct. 2001 (2015), wrote:

For instance, in Posters `N’ Things, Ltd. v. United States, 511 U.S. 513 (1994), the Court addressed a conviction for selling drug paraphernalia under a statute forbidding anyone to “‘make use of the services of the Postal Service or other interstate conveyance as part of a scheme to sell drug paraphernalia,'” id., at 516 (quoting 21 U.S.C. § 857(a)(1) (1988 ed.)).

Since Thomas’s quotation from Posters ‘N’ Things consists entirely of language drawn from the U.S. Code, The Bluebook would omit the single quotation marks and rely on the “quoting” parenthetical to inform the reader of the ultimate source.

What Should Lawyers Do in Brief or Memorandum?

Negligible space is saved by trimming single quotation marks. Indeed, space is sacrificed and the word count increased if that trimming compels the author to add a four word parenthetical phrase. That suggests, at minimum, lawyers not be influenced by the judicial practice of occasionally removing internal quotation marks from quotes that rest within longer ones, no matter the ultimate source. Absolute clarity argues for including them even when The Bluebook considers them unnecessary. In no case should there be need for an “internal quotation marks omitted” parenthetical.

Make that “Advert.” not “Adver.”

Tuesday, October 6th, 2015

For nineteen years The Bluebook has decreed that when the word “Advertising” appears in a case name it should be abbreviated as “Adver.”  The pairing of word and abbreviation first appeared in the sixteenth edition.  The codification at once captured the then prevailing professional practice and encouraged use of that abbreviation over the two common alternatives.  Those were: 1) to include the word in full or 2) to abbreviate it to coincide with the British informal term, rendering it “Advert.”

Inexplicably, the latest edition of The Bluebook has added a terminal “t”, embracing an approach it rejected in 1996. Henceforward, all who follow its mandate must cite:

  • City of Columbia v. Omni Outdoor Adver., Inc., 499 U.S. 365 (1991)
    • as
  • City of Columbia v. Omni Outdoor Advert., Inc., 499 U.S. 365 (1991)

Why make the change?  Successive editions of The Bluebook have regularly added new “mandatory” abbreviations. The T6 list of the sixteenth edition had 120 entries. In the nineteenth there were 144, including an entry for “County” (to be abbreviated “Cnty.”). This latest edition is the first, in my memory, to substitute new abbreviations for established ones. In addition to supplanting “Adver.” with “Advert.” it has replaced “Cnty.” with “Cty.” Neither change addresses a source of potential confusion. Neither is driven by professional citation practice.

A failure to proofread? Implausible. The most likely explanation lies in the increasingly proprietary claims of The Bluebook enterprise. Faced with a better teaching book, the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation, and with data sources and software packages that purport to deliver citations that conform to its rules its editors made a number of arbitrary changes. “Copy if you dare,” they seem to be saying. For those operating within the universe of law journal publication such arbitrary changes may be hard to resist. With lawyers and judges, they’ll largely be ignored.

 

The Bluebook’s Inconsistency about When to Identify an Electronic Source

Friday, August 28th, 2015

The Issue

Most legal research in the U.S. is conducted using electronic source material, and for many types of cited works, primary and secondary, there are at least several possible sources.  A pervasive issue is whether a citation ought specify the source relied upon by the author or whether instead a generic citation, adequate to retrieve the cited work from all widely used sources, will suffice.  The latest edition of The Bluebook delivers inconsistent and, at times,  confusing guidance on the point.

Cases

Consider a brief that cites a slew of cases, state and federal.  If the author has retrieved them all from an online source (Westlaw, Fastcase, Google Scholar, an official court Web site) should her citations note that source?  A fair reading of The Bluebook (20th ed.) yields the conclusion that they need not.  Rule 10.8.1 authorizes, but does not require, citation to a specific database when “a case is unreported but available in a widely used electronic database.”  There is no suggestion that a citation to a “reported” decision (i.e. reported in print), such as State v. McIver, 858 N.W.2d 699, 702 (Iowa 2015),  need state that the author relied upon Google Scholar or Fastcase or acknowledge that despite the use of volume and page numbers, she did not review the text in the print reporter to which they correspond. Similarly, a citation to State v. Ortega, 2014-NMSC-017, ¶ 55 is apparently complete without a notation clarifying whether the writer relied upon the official digital version available from the New Mexico Compilation Commission site or the altered version offered by Westlaw.  On this point The Bluebook‘s silence is in full accord with the citation practice of lawyers and judges.  The twentieth edition, like the nineteenth, appears to accept generic case citations.

Statutes, Constitutions, and Court Rules

What The Bluebook Says

Generic citations to a constitution or statutory provision are a different matter.  Rule 12.5(a) insists that when the writer’s source for a statutory code citation is an electronic database, the citation should include the name of the database, the publisher (unless a public office), and its currency.  Rule 11 lays down the same requirement for citations to constitutions even though it doesn’t call for identification of source if it is printed. (Presumably, one can be working from the U.S. Constitution as printed in The World Almanac and Book of Facts without confessing it.)  In contrast, rule 12.9.3 fully embraces citations to rules of evidence and procedure that leave off source, whether print or electronic.  Consistency in approach is lacking; no clear rationale for the different requirements is evident.

What Judges and Lawyers Do

When contemporary decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court or U.S. Court of Appeals cite provisions of the U.S. Copyright Act they refer to them by U.S. Code title and section number – no date (current provision being implied), no indication of source.  The odds are very high that the source relied upon by the judges or their clerks was Westlaw.  That being the case The Bluebook (rule 12.5) would call for a citation along these lines:

  • 17 U.S.C.A. § 301(a) (Westlaw through Pub. L. No. 114-49).

Instead the opinion will almost certainly cite the provision generically:

  • 17 U.S.C. § 301(a).

As will briefs submitted in the case.

Commentary

The Bluebook‘s strong stance on the primacy of print when citing treatises was the subject of a prior post.  Its position on law journal articles appears, at first, to be stated in similarly unequivocal terms.  Rule 16.8 requires that when “citing periodical materials to a database” one include “a citation to the database”.  But rule 18.2.1 (added with the nineteenth edition in 2010) provides that when an exact copy of a print source is available online it can be cited “as if to the original print source.”  That, of course, is standard professional practice with law journal citations.  Surely, such citations needn’t indicate whether the author retrieved the article in question from Lexis, Westlaw, HeinOnline or the journal’s own online archive.

The Rule that Should Swallow its Exceptions

The relationship between rule 18.2.1 and The Bluebook‘s various mandates to identify one’s actual source is unclear.  In all likelihood this is a case where the specific (the mandate concerning statutes, for example) is intended to prevail over the more general rule.  Both reflect the continuing grip of a print mindset, quite at odds with the world in which today’s lawyers and judges work.  Rule 18.2.1. itself carries a heading that refers to “the original print source.”  In truth the original source of nearly all print documents of the current era is electronic.  Rule 18.2.1(a)(iii) and rule 18.2.2(f) express an attachment to electronic material that is held in pdf format because it “preserves the pagination and other attributes of the printed work.”  Yet the information sources most heavily used by the legal professions, Westlaw, Lexis, Bloomberg Law, and the rest, scroll and hyperlink rather than page.  What is critical is that the source be reliably accurate and that it contain the accepted units of citation for the cited work, whether page, section, or paragraph numbers, and not that it look and behave like print.  Need it be an “exact copy” as rule 18.2.1 would seem to require?  On its face that would rule out all the online services that enhance decisions and statutes with parallel citations and other editorial tampering.  The Bluebook‘s level of unreality on these points can only be excused on the ground that it is prepared by students at four elite law schools and aimed primarily at the legal education market (list price $38.50).  Ironically, the proprietors now offer “the full content of The Bluebook” online (on a subscription basis – $36 for one year, $46 for two) and as an Apple ios app ($39.99).  Presumably, they intend these different formats to be viewed as interchangeable.  Believing it safe to rely on the authors for consistency, I don’t feel obliged to report which I relied upon in preparing this post.

Oklahoma’s Court Network Threatened by Legislative Proposal

Friday, May 29th, 2015

In 2014 this blog reported on the decision by Oklahoma’s Supreme Court that the electronic versions of state appellate decisions published on the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network (OSCN) would replace those printed in the National Reporter System as “official”.  A budget crisis brought on by declining oil revenues now places that critical publication channel in jeopardy.  A proposal before the legislature would divert nearly all the dedicated fees on which OSCN depends to other uses.

New Mexico’s Mandate That Medium-Neutral Citations Be Used for Cases Originally Issued without Them

Wednesday, May 20th, 2015

New Mexico’s Unique Citation Rule

Since August 1, 2013 briefs, memoranda, and other papers filed with New Mexico’s courts have been required to use a system of medium-neutral case citation for all New Mexico appellate decisions. That citation system, similar although not identical to the model recommended by the American Bar Association and American Association of Law Libraries, was first implemented by the New Mexico Supreme Court in 1996. Pierce v. State, released for publication on January 4th of that year, was designated “1996-NMSC-001”. The first decision of the state’s court of appeals in 1996, State v. Gutierrez, carried the citation “1996-NMCA-001”. Both were issued with numbered paragraphs. Simultaneously issued citation rules required filings in New Mexico courts to cite those decisions and subsequent ones using their medium-neutral citations.

What is unprecedented about the 2013 amendment to those rules is that it requires that New Mexico’s print-independent citation system be used for all pre-1996 decisions reaching back to 1852. No other state has taken this step. Shortly after Oklahoma implemented medium-neutral citation in 1997, it retrofitted all prior reported decisions. But that state’s citation rule, then and now, simply provides that parallel citations employing the print-independent scheme are “strongly encouraged for opinions promulgated prior to May 1, 1997“.

Some Background

The New Mexico Compilation Commission began as an agency responsible for producing a full compilation of the state’s statutes, hence its name. In 1982, however, the commission was  given additional responsibility — publication of the New Mexico Reports. In 2004 it was declared to be the state’s official legal publisher. In 2011 the commission ended print publication of the New Mexico Reports, and the state’s supreme court designated the authenticated electronic files of decisions at the Compilation Commission web site their final, official version.  And in 2012 the Commission’s database of electronic decision files, each with a medium-neutral designation  (e.g., “1982-NMCA-051”) and paragraph numbering, was extended all the way back to Bray v. United States, 1852-NMSC-001.

Today, the Compilation Commission offers legal professionals and state offices the compiled statutes of New Mexico in both print and electronic format.  Combined with the state’s case law, court rules, decisions of the regional federal courts, and other material, the commission’s integrated DVD and online database serve state and local government offices and compete with the commercial research services in the legal information market.  Because of an attractive subscription price (roughly $60 a month for the general public, less for state and local government agencies), official status, and a growing list of features (most recently a limited citator service for its case reports) these services, known as NMONESOURCE, do, in fact, offer serious competition.

The principal drawback of the Compilation Commission’s database for legal professionals is its tight focus on New Mexico.  With some frequency the state’s judges and lawyers need access to federal case law, statutes, and regulations.  On occasion, they must consult decisions from other states.  Although the Compilation Commission’s electronic library includes a collection of the most useful federal decisions and serves as a portal, linking to Google Scholar for the case law of other states and U.S. government sites for the Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations, it falls short of providing a full range of non-New Mexico primary legal material.  At a minimum the users of NMONESOURCE must, from time to time, turn to some other research service.   Convenience may lead them to stay or even start out elsewhere.  The default “other service” for New Mexico’s lawyers is Fastcase, available as a membership service to all members of the bar.   For the state’s judges it is Westlaw, to which all of them, from the district courts  through the state supreme court, have access under a group Westlaw subscription.

Consequences to Date

Compliance by Judges, Lawyers, and Law Students

Current decisions of the appellate courts of New Mexico model the citation format the 2013 rule requires of lawyers.  While that rule does not require parallel print-based citations for state decisions dated after the cutoff for the final volume of the New Mexico Reports, judges continue to include parallel references to the Pacific Reporter of the Thomson Reuters National Reporter System.   As the rule directs, however, their pinpoint references employ the paragraph numbers of the medium-neutral format.  Review of a small sample of briefs filed in recent New Mexico appeals leaves little doubt that the system has also taken hold among lawyers.  Student editors of the New Mexico Law Review employ the new citation method in their writing.

Take Up by Major Law Databases

To comply with the 2013 citation rule, the judge, lawyer, or law student needs access to a database that has retrofitted its collection of New Mexico’s pre-1996 decisions with medium-neutral case identifiers and paragraph numbers.  A database search on “contract breach” may lead a researcher to the 1959 decision of the New Mexico Supreme Court in Wolf v. Perry or the 1993 case, Mark V, Inc. v. Mellekas.  When first published and for years thereafter the volume and page numbers of those two decisions in the New Mexico Reports and Pacific Reporter would have provided proper citations.  Indeed, they had none other.  But as of August 1, 2013, Wolf v. Perry is to be cited as “1959-NMSC-044”; Mark V, Inc., as “1993-NMSC-001”.  While a search on Bloomberg Law, Google Scholar, or Fastcase will take you to those cases, none of those services yet delivers their neutral citations, let alone the paragraph numbering needed to direct a reader to a specific passage.

Does this place the subscription service offered by the New Mexico Compilation Commission in a unique competitive position?  No.  The same search conducted on LexisNexis or Westlaw reveals that those services have followed the commission’s lead and added neutral cites and paragraph numbers to all pre-1996 New Mexico cases.  Other research services serious about the New Mexico market will, no doubt, do the same.  No license from the state is required.  Despite the copyright notices that appear throughout the Compilation Commission site, New Mexico could not and does not claim copyright in either the case citations or paragraph numbers.

In the meantime, researchers who wish to cite pre-1996 cases identified through use of a database that has not inserted the new citation parameters can obtain them, case-by-case, from open access resources offered by the Compilation Commission.  The commission’s web site holds tables that allow one to convert any pre-2013 official cite (“65 N.M. 457” or “114 N.M. 778”, say) to the new system (“1959-NMSC-004” and “1993-NMSC-001”, respectively).  The site also provides, as a free public resource, a comprehensive case law collection reformatted in accordance with the new standard.  From it one can draw the paragraph numbers the new rule calls for in pinpoint cites.  Furthermore, because the commission’s site is open to external search engines it is possible to bypass the lookup tables and go straight to the decision one wants to cite.  A Google search on “114 N.M. 778” or “845 P.2d 1232” limited to the commission’s site will lead directly to the medium-neutral version of Mark V, Inc. v. Mellekas as well as recent cases citing that decision.  In fact, because the site is open to external search engines the initial case research need not begin elsewhere.

Lack of Reinforcement in NMSA and Most Other Annotations

As the state’s official publisher the New Mexico Compilation Commission also publishes the New Mexico Statutes Annotated and the New Mexico Rules Annotated.  Both are included in electronic form as components of its online and disc products.  They are also sold in print.  In neither have annotations to pre-1996 decisions yet been conformed to the new rule.  An annotation’s reference to a 1994 case will still cite it as  “In re Cutter, 118 N.M. 152, 879 P.2d 784 (1994)” rather than “In re Cutter, 1994-NMSC-086, 118 N.M. 152″.  So long as a researcher is working from the DVD or online version the annotation’s obsolete format is not a problem for the cites are linked to copies of the opinions, which carry the now official neutral citations and paragraph numbers.  On the other hand, since programmatic conversion of the old-form citations should be fairly straightforward there is reason to expect that it will occur before long.

The annotations that appear in Michie’s Annotated Statutes of New Mexico, as published online by LexisNexis, do contain cites that conform to the new rule.  Those in West’s New Mexico Statutes Annotated and in the Fastcase annotations to the New Mexico Statutes, as yet, do not.

Effects Limited to New Mexico

Many decisions of the U.S. District Court for New Mexico do employ the state’s medium-neutral citation scheme when citing its courts’ post-1996 decisions.  Not all do, however, and there is little evidence to date that federal judges will be induced to cite older New Mexico decisions in accordance with the 2013 rule.  When decisions from New Mexico, contemporary or older, are cited in other states, even states with their own systems of neutral citation, they are, almost invariably, cited by volume and page number.

A Model for Other States?

Oklahoma is the only other state to apply a non-proprietary medium-neutral citation scheme retrospectively to its full body of case law.  There, nearly two decades of “strong encouragement” to use the system in citing older decisions has had a pervasive effect on in-state citation practice.  In Oklahoma, like New Mexico, the policy was undergirded by creation of a comprehensive database of state law open to judges, other public officials, lawyers, and members of the general public — an initiative explicitly aimed at loosening dependence on commercial systems.

The barriers inhibiting prospective adoption of any new citation approach are sufficiently daunting and the costs of creating the necessary supporting database large enough that all other states adopting medium-neutral schemes have been content to leave their print-era case law wrapped in print-era citations.  Two of them, Arkansas and North Dakota, have done so despite having created public databases of earlier appellate decisions.  So long as the boundary between old and new is distinct this seems a totally defensible approach.  How a Illinois judge or lawyer should cite decisions of that state’s courts rests very clearly on when the decisions were filed.  Those released prior to July 1, 2011 and published in the Illinois Official Reports must be cited by volume and page number.  Decisions filed on or after July 1, 2011 with a “public-domain citation” must be cited using it.

What reasons might have led New Mexico to take a more radical approach to citation reform?  The first is that it could.  Without a full retrospective case law collection the publications and legal research services of the New Mexico Compilation Commission were seriously incomplete, including importantly its flagship New Mexico Statutes Annotated.  Assuming that construction of such a comprehensive digital archive had to be undertaken, the attachment of non-print-based citations in the same format as those that judges and lawyers had used for post-1996 cases may have seemed a modest add-on.  Moreover, the rule change could be seen as placing NMONESOURCE, the Compilation Commission’s subscription service, in a uniquely authoritative position.  Set up as an “enterprise unit” funded out of sales and subscription revenue along with a dedicated portion of court filing fees, the commission was in need of a resource boost.  As the annual report of the New Mexico judiciary for fiscal year 2013 noted:

The challenges facing the [commission] are the increases in publishing costs while revenue declined for the second year in a row. There is a significant loss in civil action filing fees due to the decrease in civil actions filed. There is strained subscription revenue stemming from the economy overall and the increase in self-represented litigants who elect to file civil actions and appear in court without legal counsel. Lawyers are forced to make difficult decisions to postpone subscribing to the official laws in favor of the limited, unannotated laws on the public access site.

However, since that same public access site provides a complete set of New Mexico decisions as well as look-up tables matching volume and page number cites with their medium-neutral equivalents and the leading commercial database services have rapidly incorporated the new cites, the 2013 rule change may not, in the end, have a significant effect on NMONESOURCE subscription revenue.

No other U.S. jurisdiction has an agency with the broad charge and challenging duties of New Mexico’s Compilation Commission or today has the initiative, incentive, or resources within the judiciary to create a database like the one Oklahoma established years ago.  For that reason it seems unlikely that the path New Mexico and Oklahoma have blazed will be followed by others anytime soon.

 

The Complex Relationship between Citations and Citators

Wednesday, April 29th, 2015

Shepard’s Citations

In 1873, Frank Shepard began compiling and selling lists of citations to Illinois decisions printed on gummed paper (Shepard’s System of Adhesive Citations).  Purchasers pasted them into the margins of their bound case reports.  Shepard’s lists linked each reported case to any subsequent reported decision that referred to it.  When gummed addenda proved too cumbersome a tool (even more troublesome to maintain than looseleaf volumes), Shepard’s Citations moved to separate volumes.  These were books of citations designed to stand beside law reports – volumes that simply pointed from one book to others by means of citation.

Shepards

For over a century law students, lawyers, and judges conducted forward citation searches on key decisions using the Shepard’s publications.  So tight was the association that the process became known as “Shepardizing”.  One “Shepardized” a case to assure it had not be overruled by a higher court, to determine its status and range of interpretation within the jurisdiction of origin, to see how it had been treated elsewhere.

Cases and Citators Go Digital

Once electronic databases were central to case research, their incorporation of a citator function became essential.  The value of providing the digital equivalent of Shepard’s gummed list proximate to every retrieved opinion was obvious. And in a hypertext environment that list of citing cases could itself offer point and click access to each one of them.  Moreover, once held in a database the entries could be filtered and sorted.  Today, all case law database services of professional quality offer retrieval of subsequent citing cases as an option adjacent to each opinion.  Some not only list the citing cases but analyze and characterize those references as the Shepard’s print publications once did.

As electronic case law collections evolved, however, they posed fresh challenges for these companion citators.  Increasingly the leading online databases added decisions that the Shepard’s lists had ignored, cases without standard print citations.  These included opinions that would never be published in print, either because of court designation or publisher discretion, as well as “slip” versions of those whose publication was anticipated but had not yet occurred.  Generally unexamined is the extent to which the relative performance of today’s online citators is affected by how they deal with citations in and citations to opinions falling in these two categories.  That performance varies considerably.  Researchers who assume complete results are, with some services, likely to miss important cases.  Those who know the limitations of the citator on which they rely can, when necessary, augment its results with their own database search.

The Citator Challenges Posed by Unpublished Decisions

Citations to Not Yet Published Decisions

Because of their high volume Social Security cases provide a particularly clear illustration of the problem posed by the delayed application of citation parameters and the range of responses to it by the citators now embedded in the major online services.  As of April 23 five “precedential” decisions in cases appealing a denial of benefits by the Social Security Administration had been released by the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals since the beginning of 2015.  (Decisions the Court does not deem significant to other cases it labels “Nonprecedential” and withholds from publication in the Thomson Reuters Federal Reporter series.)  “Four of the five were written by Judge Richard Posner.  Three of his decisions and one by Judge Daniel Manion reversed trial court decisions that had affirmed the agency’s benefit denial.

From the moment of release, the potential ripple effect of opinions like these is substantial, throughout the district courts falling within the Seventh Circuit and beyond.  Consider the numbers.  During the twelve months ending June 30, 2014, those districts received 1,441 Social Security appeals.  Within weeks, in some cases days, the five 2015 Court of Appeals decisions were being cited.  Curvin v. Colvin, No. 13-3622 (7th Cir. Feb. 11, 2015), the earliest of the set, has now been cited at least 12 times.  (A pro-claimant Social Security decision of the Seventh Circuit handed down a little over a year ago  – Moore v. Colvin, 743 F.3d 1118 (7th Cir. 2014) –  has been cited over 125 times, at least twice outside the circuit.)

Curvin illustrates the difficulty faced by anyone or any system attempting to track these citing references.  The decision was handed down on February 11, 2015 but did not receive its “778 F.3d 645” designation until a month and a half later.  During the intervening weeks it was cited at least eight times by district courts within the Seventh Circuit.  Perforce those citations identified the Seventh Circuit opinion by docket number and exact date or a proprietary database citation (“WL”).  Most, but not all, used both in parallel, yielding citations in the following form: Curvin v. Colvin, No. 13-3622, 2015 WL 542847 (7th Cir. Feb. 11, 2015).  A straight database search on “778 F.3d 645” will not retrieve those cases.  A database search on “2015 WL 542847” will retrieve those using the Westlaw cite (but not those employing the LEXIS equivalent “2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 2170” or the “F.3d” cite).  A search on “13-3622” and “Curvin” will retrieve those including Curvin’s docket number but not those relying solely on a proprietary database cite or the ultimate “F.3d” cite.

Most case law databases purport to do this messy work for the researcher.  With some Curvin’s rank in a set of search results may even be determined by how many citations to it there have been.  What not all manage to do is to include those instances of citation that occurred so soon after Curvin’s release they could not refer to the case as “778 F.3d 645”.  A review of how the major systems actually address this issue (or don’t) follows.

Westlaw

The dominance of Westlaw within the federal judiciary gives that system a clear advantage.  So long as the early decisions cite the not-yet-published version of a case using its “WL” citation, Westlaw can employ that identifier to link them with those citing to the version later published in the company’s National Reporter System (NRS).  But what about decisions written by  federal judges who use LexisNexis and cite using its proprietary system?  Senior Judge Donetta W. Ambrose of the Western District of Pennsylvania falls in this category.  Had she relied on Curvin in late February or early March 2015, her opinion would almost certainly have cited it: Curvin v. Colvin, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 2170 (7th Cir. 2015).  (See, for example, her decision in Nickens v. Colvin.)  How would Westlaw have responded?  It would have added a parallel “2015 WL 542847” to her Lexis cite, as it does to all opinion citations to “not yet published” or “never to be published” cases contained in the Westlaw database.  That editorial step simplifies aggregation of all citations to a case prior its print publication.  While Westlaw no longer displays the “WL” cite for decisions that have been given print citations in the National Reporter System, the service’s citation listings rest on its maintaining the association between preliminary “WL” cites and their subsequent NRS equivalents.  This approach enables Westlaw’s listing of cases citing Curvin to include the early ones that did not use its F.3d volume and page number.

westlaw_citator

LexisNexis

Lexis follows a similar strategy.  Since most federal judges use Westlaw most of the early decisions citing Curvin used its Westlaw cite.  See, e.g., Haire v. Colvin, No. 1:14-CV-00322-TAB-JMS (S.D. Ind. Feb. 20, 2015).  On Lexis the cite to Curvin in Haire includes an added “U.S. App. LEXIS” cite.  That enables the inclusion of Haire in the service’s dynamically generated list of decisions citing Curvin.  It also facilitates another Lexis practice, the subsequent addition of parallel “F.3d” cites to decisions that did not, as written, include them.

lexis_citator

Bloomberg Law

Bloomberg has a “BL” citing scheme which it now deploys much like the Lexis cites, but with greater clarity.  When a case in its database is cited by a later decision using only docket number and date or a Westlaw or Lexis cite, Bloomberg inserts a parallel “BL” cite.  This editorial addition is, however, placed in square brackets, an acknowledgment that it was not part of the original text.  Bloomberg Law has expanded Haire’s cite to Curvin written by the court as “Curvin v. Colvin, No. 13-3622, 2015 WL 542847, at *4, — F.3d —- (7th Cir. Feb. 11, 2015)” to “Curvin v. Colvin, No. 13-3622, [2015 BL 34654], 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 2170 , 2015 WL 542847 , at *4, ___ F.3d ___ (7th Cir. Feb. 11, 2015)”.  This practice appears relatively new.  Decisions of an earlier vintage Bloomberg loaded as received without adding “BL” parallel cites.  As a result decisions from that period are missed by Bloomberg’s linked retrieval of citing documents.  (The fact that Bloomberg’s versions of decisions now also include the Lexis cite, without the square brackets, suggests a data sharing arrangement between the two companies.)

bloomberg_citator

Judging at least from this sample of one, Bloomberg appears to add cases more rapidly than either Westlaw or Lexis.  During the week of April 20th two more district court decisions citing Curvin were released.  Both were in the Bloomberg database and listed as citing cases the following day.

The More Limited Approach of Google Scholar, Fastcase, and Casemaker

Google Scholar does not to attempt to track citing references for cases until they have received a permanent citation in the Thomson Reuters books.  To date it does not have the NRS version of Curvin.  When one clicks on the “How cited” link for the “slip” version of the  case, one gets the message: “We could not determine how this case has been cited.”  To find those cases a researcher must know to search on the party names and Curvin’s docket number or, alternatively, on its proprietary cites.  The latter, of course, do not appear on Google Scholar or the public domain version of Curvin released by the Seventh Circuit and now (and forever?) available from the GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys).  At some point Scholar will replace the original version of Curvin with that published by Thomson Reuters.  Once it has, the decision’s “How cited” link will work, but it will not retrieve the early cases which did not cite Curvin by volume and page number because they could not.  Researchers who know that can augment Google’s automatically generated list by doing the sort of searches suggested above.

Like Google Scholar both Casemaker and Fastcase limit their retrieval of citing cases to those that cite by means of NRS volume and page number, thereby missing the earliest references.  Leavitt v. Cohen, No. 1:12-cv-1427-DKL-JMS (S.D. Ind. March 4, 2014) cited Moore v. Colvin, 743 F.3d 1118 (7th Cir. 2014), released less than a week before, using the format: Moore v. Colvin, ___ F.3d ___, 2014 WL 763223, *1(7th Cir. 2014).  Since neither Fastcase nor Casemaker later fill in such blank “F.3d” citations or employ an enduring identifier for Moore (like the proprietary citation schemes of Bloomberg, Lexis, and Westlaw) neither includes Leavitt as a case citing Moore as those services do.

What about Newcomers like Ravel Law and Casetext?

Casetext does not yet have a fully developed method of indexing citing cases.  It is designed to allow the ranking of search results by “Cite count” but while its database includes many more it lists only two cases as citing Moore.

Ravel has stronger incentive to solve the citator problem because its visualization of search results derives in significant part from citation links.  However, to date Ravel’s cite count does not include case citations that pre-date the availability of the canonical NRS volume and page cite for a case.  It counts only 70 cases as citing Moore v. Colvin.  Those in its database not using that decision’s full “F.3d” cite do not make the list.

Citators and Never-to-be-Published Decisions

A 2013 “unpublished” Social Security decision of the Ninth Circuit illuminates this closely related citator issue. In Farias v. Colvin, No. 11-57088 (9th Cir. May 20, 2013), the court reversed a district court decision that had affirmed a denial of disability benefits.  Its memorandum opinion faulted the Administrative Law Judge’s uncritical acceptance of testimony from a vocational expert.  Being an unpublished memorandum opinion the Farias decision does not enjoy the status of precedent even within the courts that comprise the Ninth Circuit. Print-based Shepard’s would have ignored it.

On the other hand, unpublished decisions like Farias can be cited by counsel as persuasive authority.  In fact, at least fifteen subsequent (unpublished) district court decisions refer to the Farias case.  Because of the Thomson Reuters Federal Appendix reporter, Farias did in fact receive a print citation before 2013 was over, notwithstanding its “unpublished” designation, but not before being cited in at least two district court decisions.  Thus, in one sense cases like it pose the same problem for citation compilers as those posed by cases eventually published in the Federal Reporter – a need to gather the earliest citations together with later ones expressed in terms of print volume and page numbers.  However, the decision’s “unpublished” status and the dubious value of “Fed. Appx.” cites has led some case law services to stumble over providing useful citator results.  The major three –Bloomberg, Lexis, and Westlaw – use their respective systems of proprietary citation to link Farias to the full spectrum of citing district court decisions.  In contrast users of Google Scholar, Casemaker, and Fastcase are led to believe that Farias has not been cited unless they know enough to undertake a forward citation search on their own.  And because some of the citing cases use the Farias decision’s “Fed. Appx.” cite and others don’t, some include the case docket number but most don’t, some use a proprietary database citation and others not, no single search other than one based simply on the case name (“Farias v. Colvin”) will retrieve them all.

One More Argument for Adoption of Court-Applied Systems of Citation

In jurisdictions that attach official citations to decisions at the time of release there is little difficulty generating a complete list of subsequent citing cases.  Assuming that the court-attached citations are routinely used (whether or not in parallel with the National Reporter System or any other citation) a simple database search will retrieve all citing references.  In 1999 the Oklahoma Supreme Court decided an influential case dealing with attorney malpractice liability.  When released it carried the designation “1999 OK 79”.  A search on that string, whether carried out directly by a researcher or automatically by software generating a citator list, should gather a comprehensive list of references to Manley v. Brown.  That fact has enabled the Oklahoma State Courts Network database to append a list of citing cases to the decision in Manley.  Although the case appears in the National Reporter System as “989 P.2d 448” a researcher or automated citator searching cases for references to Manley will not be thrown off by use of that print reference so long as it appears in parallel with the court-attached cite, as it does in all Oklahoma decisions and in a 2013 decision of the Illinois Appellate Court.  Any citation search that relies solely on NRS citations for Oklahoma cases runs the risk of missing some.

How Google Scholar Undercuts Jurisdictions Going Digital While It Could as Easily Support them

Monday, January 26th, 2015

Google Scholar’s case law collection has been an enormous boon to this country’s lawyers and all others puzzling over U.S. law.  Not only does it provide free and direct access to a professional quality case database, but it enables legal commentary linked to governing precedent to reside outside a pay wall.  Ironically, this breakthrough electronic research tool remains largely reliant on print source material.  That is for many jurisdictions a direct consequence of the courts themselves being stuck in obsolete publication practices.  But Scholar’s reliance on print holds even for states in which there is a more authoritative digital alternative.  In the case of several state courts that have recently shifted to official online publication, Scholar persists in loading digitized versions of their decisions drawn from the pages of the Thomson Reuters National Reporter System (NRS).  For at least one – Illinois – this is done without preserving the official citation information required in all submissions to that state’s courts.

Exhibit No. 1: Google Scholar’s Treatment of Illinois Decisions

In July 2011, less than two years after Google Scholar unveiled its case law database, Illinois began publishing the official versions of its appellate decisions online.  Print publication of the Illinois Official Reports ceased.  As a consequence the final and official version of the Illinois Supreme Court in Lake County Grading Co. v. Village of Antioch, 2014 IL 115805 (and all other binding decisions rendered by Illinois appellate courts since the switch) is available for anyone, including Google, to download from a public site.  The text’s official status is indicated, and all that one needs to cite that decision to an Illinois court, in whole or in part, is contained in the electronic document.  One could hope, one might expect, that Google Scholar would embrace and leverage this judicial reform.  The change was, after all, prompted by many of the same goals that lie behind the Google initiative.  Yet Scholar continues to digitize the print NRS version of this and other post-2011 Illinois decisions.  Worse, while doing so it drops the medium neutral citations by which Illinois courts identify those decisions and require those invoking them to employ (“2014 IL 115805” in the case of Lake County Grading).  Google’s practice appears to be to harvest Illinois decisions when first released in slip opinion form, to ignore the subsequent “official” electronic version, and ultimately to replace the slip opinion with a digitized copy of the NRS text.  This final case report displays the volume number and page at which the decision is located within the NRS North Eastern Reporter as well as its internal pagination and paragraph numbers.  But critically it omits the official medium-neutral case cite.  For an example take a look at People v. Colyar, 2013 IL 111835.  It can’t be said that Scholar completely ignores the new non-print Illinois citations, for it uses them to index decisions.  As a result Colyar’s citation (“2013 IL 111835”) entered as a search will retrieve the case.  The official cite also appears in Colyar’s listing when the decision is retrieved by a typical word search.  The problem is that it remains absent from the opinion text when displayed on the screen, downloaded, or printed out.

Exhibit No. 2: New Mexico

New Mexico furnishes a second example of Google’s unfortunate print bias.  Like Illinois, New Mexico ceased publishing official print reports in 2011.  Since then the official version of any precedential New Mexico decision is contained in an electronic file retrievable without charge from the New Mexico Compilation Commission siteZhao v. Montoya, 2014-NMSC-025 is one such case.  Ignoring the change, Google Scholar has continued to draw its final text of the state’s appellate decisions from the NRS Pacific Reporter.  However, probably because New Mexico began attaching neutral citations to decisions long before the Scholar case database was conceived or designed, Google’s print-based acquisition process has, from the start, extracted those official citations from the NRS reports and included them within each case.  On the other hand, since Google Scholar relies on the Pacific Reporter for that information, decisions appear without their official citation until they have been published by Thomson Reuters and digitized by Google from that print source.  Compare the official version of Wilkeson v. State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co., 2014-NMCA-077, with that provided by Google Scholar.

Exhibit No. 3: Oklahoma

Scholar’s treatment of Oklahoma decisions demonstrates that this need not be so.  The Oklahoma judiciary declared its online publication of appellate decisions official as of the beginning of 2014.  As with the others this reform did not alter Google Scholar’s reliance on the NRS as the ultimate source of Oklahoma’s case law.  Scholar continues to download Oklahoma decisions from the public site at the time of initial release, ignore the subsequent electronic versions designated as “official”, and replace the original files with digital copies of the texts once they appear in the Pacific Reporter.  There is one important difference.  Each decision’s medium neutral citation (e.g., “2013 OK CIV APP 105”) is displayed at the top from the beginning.

Exhibit No. 4: Arkansas

Official Arkansas case reports have been electronic since 2009.  That same year the Arkansas Supreme Court erased the distinction between published and unpublished decisions.  All decisions of the Arkansas Supreme Court and Court of Appeals now carry precedential weight.  Faced with the resulting surge in the volume of citable Arkansas decisions, Thomson Reuters, refused to publish them all.  Without guidance from the Arkansas courts, the company’s editors now select only a small percentage for print publication (less than 17% of the 2013 Court of Appeals decisions).  Those that appear in S.W.3d are digitized by Google Scholar (complete with internal pagination) from that source and substituted for the prior court-distributed version.  While Google’s digitization process retains the public domain case designations applied by the deciding court (e.g., “2013 Ark. App. 738”) it strips out another crucial citation element.  Although the NRS version displays the page breaks that appear in the official electronic case report, Scholar leaves them out.  For that reason its versions of Arkansas decisions, both those drawn from the official site and those based on the regional reporter, cannot be used to prepare pinpoint citations in the format called for by that state’s appellate rules.

Exhibit No. 5: Ohio

When the Ohio Supreme Court implemented a non-print citation system in 2002 it too removed the prior distinction between “published and unpublished” decisions.  Ten years later it abandoned print publication of all decisions from the Ohio Court of Appeals.  Since July 1, 2012 the official version of any decision of that court has been the authenticated electronic copy released by the Reporter of Decisions.  During 2013 the court’s twelve districts issued over 5,200 such precedential opinions.  Only 360 or so were selected by the NRS editors for publication in the North Eastern Reporter.  As with Arkansas, Google Scholar loads the entire set of Court of Appeals decisions, later adding  volume and page number cites to the indexing data for those decisions that appear in the regional reporter.  It does not, however, display the NRS reporter citation as part of the opinion.  As is true of the official cites in Illinois, these appear only as part of the listing of results delivered in response to a search.  Thus while a search on “992 N.E.2d 453” will retrieve State v. Venes, 2013 Ohio 1891 (Ct. App. 8th Dist.), that NRS citation does not appear within the opinion nor does Scholar show the NRS pagination.

Google Scholar’s Treatment of the Official Print Reports of California, Massachusetts, and New York Demonstrates that It Can Do Better

The Ohio example reveals that Google’s reliance on the Thomson Reuters reports does not reflect its approach to all U.S. jurisdictions, cost-effective though that might be.  After all, economy and efficiency might well argue for acquiring all case data from that single source.  Ohio does not stand alone.  In the case of several states that still publish their own law reports in print (or contracting for their publication) Google digitizes those reports rather than their NRS counterparts.

California, Massachusetts, and New York are among those “official report” states.  Importantly, these three employ distinct formats for internal citations.  To illustrate, as published in New York’s official reports, the New York Court of Appeals decision in De La Cruz v. Caddell Dry Dock & Repair Co., 21 N.Y.3d 530 (2013), cites a prior decision of the court as follows: “Brukhman v Giuliani (94 NY2d 387 [2000])”.  In the Thomson Reuters editions the citation to Brukhman v. Giuliani becomes: “Brukhman v. Giuliani, 94 N.Y.2d 387, 705 N.Y.S.2d 558, 727 N.E.2d 116 (2000)”.  As detailed in a prior post, such citation format differences make it easy to detect whether the decision texts for the jurisdiction have been drawn from its official reports or from the proprietary NRS.

Applied to Google Scholar this analysis establishes that it currently draws New York case data from the official reports.  Have a look at its version of De La Cruz.  Although the volume and page numbers at which that decision appears in the North Eastern Reporter and New York Supplement have been added so that users can extract a parallel cite, the format of the citations contained within Scholar’s version of De La Cruz decision, as well as the page breaks shown within the text, reveal the version to be a digital copy of the official report.  Similar citation analysis reveals that Google Scholar also relies on California and Massachusetts official reports for decisions from those states.  In other words, Google’s data acquisition process does not rest exclusively or consistently on the Thomson Reuters reports.

Drawing on the official reports of California, New York, and Massachusetts necessitates digitizing print.  But with states like Illinois and the others that have moved to official electronic distribution this is unnecessary.  Transposed to them, using the official version of decisions would avoid that costly process and require only two or three steps:

  1. Loading opinions as first released, include all citation data embedded in them (case cites, paragraph numbers, or when necessary, as with Arkansas, internal pagination). Google currently accomplishes this with Oklahoma and Ohio, but fails to do so for Arkansas, Illinois, or New Mexico.
  2. Second, if decisions are initially released in a preliminary or slip form, substituting their final, official versions, once available, again, retaining all citation data. Patently, Google follows this pattern in New York, California, and Massachusetts where that final, official version is brought out in print.
  3. Finally, adding a parallel National Reporter System volume and page number cite to the official medium neutral citation once it becomes available. Google’s process for decisions from New Mexico and Oklahoma, not to speak of the print publication states, New York, California, and Massachusetts, demonstrates that its data systems are capable of this step.

One can hope for the day when all U.S. courts publish their official reports electronically, allowing the full range of legal research services to redistribute final, official, citable copies, adding diverse levels and types of editorial enhancement, including their own citation schemes.  Jurisdictions weighing a shift toward that future ought to be encouraged.  More respectful recognition of the measures taken by states that have already gone digital is an essential first step.  Google Scholar, the dominant free source of U.S. case law, ought to lead the way.

Citations Generated by the Major Online Systems

Friday, November 14th, 2014

A recent post on the Legal Writing Prof Blog draws attention to Westlaw’s copy-with-reference feature. Its author raises a concern that the option to have citations formatted in the ALWD style still yields citations conformed to that manual’s fourth edition rather than the fifth edition, published earlier this year.  Since ALWD’s new version adheres to The Bluebook’s citation style in nearly all particulars, that problem is easily solved: The Westlaw folks need simply to remove the ALWD option.  However, those engaged in teaching legal writing and introducing law students to citation need to be attentive to numerous other imperfections in this WestlawNext feature and its LexisAdvance analog, as well as in the citations generated by other research services those 1Ls may employ once in practice.

copywithcite1

To begin, although the blogger writes of there being a Bluebook option, that label does not appear among the citation format options of either major service.  The default citation style offered by both Westlaw and Lexis is denominated “Standard”.  Is that due to trademark concerns?  For reasons set out in an earlier post, I doubt it.  The truth is that neither system consistently produces Bluebook compliant citations across the several types of authority and to suggest otherwise would be misleading.  “Standard” doesn’t make such a claim, although it appears it may lead legal writing teachers and their students, not to speak of lawyers and other online researchers, to believe that is the case.

One other point made in that short post arouses concern. Its author observes that because of this new and amazing feature “I can spend a little less time teaching citation format.”  For reasons explained in the latest version of Basic Legal Citation, I view that as a mistake. Let me point out a few reasons why a researcher who wants to employ Bluebook (or ALWD) conforming citations in a brief or memorandum will have to know enough to add, subtract, or modify those delivered by either Westlaw or Lexis.

1. Cases

As pointed out in an earlier post, a major attraction of any copy-with-reference function is that the case name segment of the citations it delivers will have been shrunk through the dropping and abbreviating of certain words.  Per The Bluebook a decision rendered in the matter of

Edward Mann and Holly Mann, Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. LaSalle National Bank, as Trustee under Trust Agreement dated March 22, 1960, and known as Trust No. 24184; Ellenora Kelly; John J. Waters; Irene Breen, as Trustee under Provisions of the Trust Agreement dated January 31, 1973, and known as Trust No. 841; Unknown Beneficiaries of Trust Agreement dated January 31, 1973, and known as Trust No. 841; and Unknown Owners, Defendants-Appellants

is reduced to “Mann v. LaSalle Nat’l Bank”.  Westlaw’s “Standard” format citation for the case is a close though not identical “Mann v. LaSalle Nat. Bank”.  Not The Bluebook’s “Nat’l” nor the “Natl.” favored by earlier editions of the ALWD manual and Bloomberg Law but “Nat.”, the abbreviation long employed by West Publishing Company.

Illinois has its own style manual.  It contains a very short list of names that are to be abbreviated in case names.  “National” is not one of them.  Consequently, citations to Mann by Illinois courts present the case name as “Mann v. LaSalle National Bank”.  One might expect that since Westlaw’s copy-with-reference offers an “Illinois” option choosing it would yield that result.  It doesn’t; the case name for this decision still comes out as “Mann v. LaSalle Nat. Bank”.  LexisAdvance also offers a choice between “Standard” and “Illinois” style citations when copying passages from Mann.  As with Westlaw they render the case name identically.  But in compliance with The Bluebook, Lexis abbreviates “National” as “Nat’l”.

A big deal?  Grounds for choosing Lexis over Westlaw?  Hardly.  I know of no instance of an attorney being chastised by a court for using non-Bluebook abbreviations and have argued that consistent use of those delivered by the writer’s online source ought to be a totally acceptable approach in professional practice.  With their tight attachment to The Bluebook, law journal editors are likely to disagree.

The bigger deal is how Westlaw and Lexis treat the balance of a case citation, particularly if the jurisdiction has, like Illinois, adopted a system of non-print-based citation.  Take the recent case of Brandhorst v. Johnson.  In decisions of Illinois courts and briefs submitted to them a reference to a particular passage of that case in the form ”Brandhorst v. Johnson, 2014 IL App (4th) 130923, ¶ 57” would be complete.  The Bluebook insists that a reference to the National Reporter System (“12 N.E.3d 198, 210” in the case of that passage of Brandhorst) be included in parallel.  When the paragraph in question is copied from WestlawNext with its citation in “Standard” format the paragraph number is not included in the cite.  (LexisAdvance includes it.)  Westlaw does not include the parallel N.E.3d cite in either the “Standard” or “Illinois” style citations for the case. Lexis includes it and adhering to The Bluebook includes a pinpoint page reference.  However, Lexis departs from The Bluebook by throwing in the totally unnecessary “382 Ill. Dec. 198, 206” when the “Standard” format is chosen.  Westlaw’s “Illinois” style citation for the case adds the parenthetical “(Ill. App. Ct. 4th Dist. June 11, 2014)” which none of the style manuals calls for.  The Illinois style guide explicitly states that there is no need for a citation to identify the appellate district “unless that information is of particular relevance to the discussion”.  (Moreover, since the district number is part of the jurisdiction’s public domain citation system, with any recent case like Brandhorst its repetition in a parenthetical wastes space.)  In sum, neither Westlaw nor Lexis delivers a Bluebook cite for this case.  Neither delivers an “Illinois” format citation that conforms to the state’s style guide.  Users who would conform their writing to either of those citation standards need to modify or add to what those online systems serve up programmatically along with a copied passage.

2. Statutes (and regulations)

A provision of the Social Security Act with considerable contemporary relevance is to be found in 42 U.S.C. § 416(h)(1)(A)(ii).  Copy its language with citation from Westlaw and what you get is “42 U.S.C.A. § 416 (West)”.  Lexis renders its citation as “42 USCS § 416”.  Neither service is prepared to yield its branded designation of the U.S. Code to the conventionally used generic or official format.  Neither includes a date or other indication of the currency of the compilation The Bluebook calls for.  And critically, neither provides the absolutely essential subsection and paragraph identifiers that specify the portion of 42 U.S.C. § 416 one is copying.  The blocked text may include “(ii)” but that alone is not enough.  The same failure to reach below the section level holds with citations to regulations.

3. Conclusion

At their current stage of evolution none of the major research services (including not only Westlaw and Lexis, but Bloomberg Law, Fastcase, and Casemaker) can be relied upon to produce primary law citations that fully comply with The Bluebook or, indeed, any of the other citation styles they may list.  In any setting where citation format is critical, users need to know that.  And all researchers need to be aware that the citations of statutes or regulations these systems generate will often be seriously incomplete.