B. How the Electronic Legal Research Environment Bears on the Question for Those Who Write Judicial Opinions<\/h2>\n1. Online, the citations in judicial opinions are converted to links<\/h3>\n
For most of us, the citations to cases, statutes, and administrative regulations we encounter in a judicial opinion are no longer static information about the authorities on which the text rests but electronic pathways enabling immediate access to them.\u00a0 Read from a screen rather than a page they invite the reader, whether on the first pass through or on a subsequent one, to move back and forth between the primary text and the sources it cites.\u00a0 Nor need the exploration end with the first link out, for authorities cited by that initial reference, can themselves be inspected with a touch of the screen or click of the mouse.\u00a0 Cited cases can, with equal ease, be read against subsequent decisions interpreting, distinguishing, disagreeing, or even overruling their position.\u00a0 The routine conversion of judicial citations to electronic pathways out from the text and targets for citator links into opinions has a direct bearing on optimal citation placement or so it seems to me.<\/p>\n
2. Treatment of citation footnotes by most legal research services<\/h3>\n
The majority of legal database services convert footnotes to linked endnotes.\u00a0 What this means for citations placed in footnotes can be seen in Google Scholar\u2019s rendition<\/a> of Harris v. Auto Club Ins. Ass\u2019n<\/i>,\u00a0 (2013).\u00a0 The route to the authorities cited on a point resulting from this treatment consists of two hops, the first following a link from the footnote call to the note, the second on to the case or statutory provision.\u00a0 Importantly, having been moved from the bottom of the page to the end of the opinion, the citation can no longer be viewed together with the text to which it is attached \u2013 a distinct negative.<\/p>\n Compare the Harris<\/i> example with a Posner opinion (or, for that matter, with a decisioin by the U.S. Supreme Court).\u00a0 When I look at Judge Posner\u2019s decision in a recent Social Security case, Hughes v. Astrue<\/i>, 705 F.3d 276<\/a> (7th<\/sup> Cir. 2013) I find the proximity of the citations to the propositions they support a decided help in determining whether and when to follow the electronic paths they offer and a convenience when I make such a journey out and back.<\/p>\n No doubt these considerations explain why neither Lexis nor Westlaw converts judicial opinion footnotes to endnotes.\u00a0 Their \u201cclassic\u201d versions place notes directly following the paragraph in which their calls appear (making them \u201cparagraph-notes,\u201d if you will).\u00a0 And their next generation systems, LexisAdvance and Westlaw Next, put footnotes in popup windows that appear immediately adjacent to their calls when activated.<\/p>\n![\"Harris](\"https:\/\/citeblog.access-to-law.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/harris.jpg\")
<\/a>The distance between text and citation is even more troublesome when the citation is itself the target of a citator link or search.\u00a0 Consider a researcher working forward from Smith v. Physicians Health Plan, Inc.<\/i>, 444 Mich. 743<\/a> (1994).\u00a0 An up-to-date index of cases citing Smith<\/i> will list and link to Harris<\/i>; however, since the full cite to Smith<\/i> lies in footnote 24 of Harris<\/i>, the careful researcher will need to go there before backtracking to the paragraph discussing that 1994 decision.\u00a0 And on Google Scholar, Bloomburg Law, Casemaker, Fastcase, and Loislaw footnote 24 has become endnote 24.<\/p>\n![\"Hughes](\"https:\/\/citeblog.access-to-law.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/hughes.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n3. The conversion of footnotes to \u201cparagraph notes\u201d or popups<\/h3>\n
![\"Harris](\"https:\/\/citeblog.access-to-law.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/harris_lexis.jpg\")
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