Electronic Distribution of Opinions

Electronic Distribution of Opinions
Citation Issues

As some Texas appellate courts undertake to distribute electronic copies of opinions to the public, and others are considering sharing electronic copies of opinions with other courts, it is important to ensure that those opinons are presented in the most useable form possible. This requires that the opinions are easily located and citeable. This paper seeks to briefly identify some of the relevant considerations for ensuring the value of programs to distribute electronic copies of Texas court opinions. This paper is written under the assumption that the primary goal of electronic distribution of opinions is to make opinions fully useful in the period between issuance and publication in commercial reporter services.

A threshold issue for making opinions in electronic format easy to distribute and locate is the adoption of a naming convention for the files containing those opinions. The choice of file names for opinions initially appears to be a simple matter of choosing a unique name for each opinion, typically based on some variant of the appeal's docket number. However, as multiple courts from various jurisdictions begin to make electronic copies of opinions available, many of which will be maintained on the same network or collection of networks, the requirement of uniqueness becomes more important and significantly more difficult.

Some jurisdictions have adopted, and others are considering, a format neutral public domain citation created by the court at the time of the opinion's issuance. Unlike citations to official reports, format neutral citations do not make reference to book volumes or pages, rather, each opinion is assigned a unique number by the issuing court. A similar practice was advocated by John B. West, founder of West Publishing in Multiplicity of Reports, 2 LAW LIBR. J. 4, 5 (1909). fn1

There are two basic approaches to format neutral public domain citations. The first bases the citation on the year of the decision, a court identifier, a sequential number issued by the court and optionally, a paragraph number to identify a particular portion of the opinion. For example:

Smith v. Jones, 1996 Tex. 15, 10

Some variation of this approach has been adopted by South Dakota and the Sixth Circuit and is under consideration by Wisconsin fn2 and California.fn3 It is also the approach supported, either formally or informally, by the American Bar Association, American Association of Law Libraries, and the National Center for State Courts' committee on Judicial Electronic Document and Data Interchange (JEDDI).fn4 This approach is also used by legal publishers. However no two publishers use the same implementation. The result is that the temporary citations created by these publishers are of little value to courts or attorneys using a different service. fn5

The Sixth Circuit's practice of including a file name in the headings of its opinions illustrates how a filename can be easily derived from this type of public domain citation. For example the public citation for the Sixth Circuit's January 24, 1996 opinion in Aetna Casualty v. Sunshine Corp. is: 1996 FED App. 0026P (6th Cir.)(note - the "P" designates the opinion as published). Resulting in the file name: 96a0026p.06. The citation and file name bear no relation to the appeal's docket number, 94-6058. Note, however, that the filename is only unique within the federal courts, it fails to distinguish the opinion from one that might be issued by a state court.

A second approach to format neutral public domain citation bases the citation on the appeal's docket number. This approach has been adopted in Lousiana. For example, the public domain citation for the opinion appearing at 665 So.2d 142 is: 95-0954 (La.App.4 Cir. 11/30/95). This is also the approach taken by most of the courts that make available electronic copies of their opinions but have not formally adopted a format neutral public domain citation. Because of the eleven character restriction on filenames,fn6 use of this approach also suffers from the inability to designate the jurisdiction in filenames.

Advantages of a sequential number approach include greater assurance that filenames will be unique even when multiple opinions are issued in a single appeal. It also has a greater likelihood of uniformity with other jurisdictions. Disadvantages include the difficulty in securing its adoption by all Texas appellate courts. The benefits of a single set of sequential numbers for all Texas opinions would present some logistical hurdles that would be exacerbated by non-participation by some courts. Unless all Texas appellate courts adopted this approach, its use by other courts would be of limited benefit and might lead to significant confusion.

Adoption of a docket number based system would have significantly greater tolerance for non-participation by some courts while still retaining most of its usefulness. This is so because any citation conforming to Bluebook Rule 10.8.1(a) will usually contain sufficient information to locate the file with a name based on the appeal's docket number. Similarly, any copy of an opinion, regardless of source, would contain sufficient information from which to form a Rule 10.8.1(a) citation. Regardless of the approach ultimately taken, it should be possible to implement automatic generation of either type of citation (and corresponding filenames) in the Case Management software. Using the Case Management software to generate citations and filenames would ensure both uniformity and uniqueness.

Although the jurisdictions that are now using format neutral public domain citations permit them to be used as parallel citations to regional reporters (or the Federal Reports for the Sixth Circuit), the creation of a public domain citation can be justified for the more limited purpose of 1) use by courts and litigants until the cited opinion is published in the Southwestern Reporter and 2) to facilitate the preservation of a permanent electronic archive of opinions. Because the Case Management software permits recordation of the Southwestern Reporter citation for each opinion and could be altered to record opinion filenames, creation and distribution of tables correlating opinion filenames and Southwestern Reporter citations would be a trivial matter.

Locator Tools

In addition to the current practice of retrieving electronic copies of opinions by locating the appropriate file in a known archive of opinions, several techniques are under development that are designed to permit the creation of digital libraries. The goal is to permit the retrevial of any "digital object" based solely on a unique name assigned to the object. Because these techniques have sigificant implications for both the formatting and distribution of electronic copies of opinions, a basic understanding of their operation is important to the creation of systems that will integrate smoothly with these emerging techniques.

Two prominent systems currently under development are the Persistant Uniform Resource Locator (PURL) by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), and the Handles System, by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CRNI). Both are similar in operation. Because the Handles System has been more fully documented, it will be used to illustrate the technique. The system operates by assigning a unique identifier, or handle, to every file sought to be retrieved by the system. The handle and the file's location are then registered with a handle server. The handle server can either be private, on a local network, or public, as on the Internet. When a user requests a document by submitting its handle, the handle server reports the location of the file which is then retrieved and presented to the user. This ability becomes profoundly significant when opinions are presented in formats that allow hypertext links between documents. By allowing a document to be linked to other documents without regard to the location of the cited document, all citations in opinions can, if desired, be presented as active links to the cited cases or statutes.

The Handles System naming convention is sufficiently flexible to allow truely unique names for opinions across jurisdictions. Handles take the form: naming authority/name. Naming authorities are organized in a heirarchy, with each being able to create sub-naming authorities. Document names need only be unique with reference to the issuing naming authority. For example, if the State of Texas were a top-level naming authority, and designated a sub-naming authority for Texas courts, an opinion from the Amarillo Court of Appeals might have a handle like:

texas.courts/07.96.0002.01.P

where 01 designates the first opinion issued in the appeal and "P" designates the opinion as published.

Clint Sare
(2/13/96)
Please see the addendum to this article for a description of the file naming system used by the Seventh Court of Appeals.

Endnotes

1. West wrote:

[D]oes it not seem strange that courts which file and docket their pending cases numerically should not record their precedents in a similar way? Especially since this will enable any one having studied a case in any publication, or indeed in manuscript, to cite it as though it had already appeared in the official volume. The reporting number or universal citation being made a part of the title when the decision is filed, will attach and appear in any and all copies and all publications thereof. This makes the case easily found and permantly identified.

John B. West, Multiplicity of Reports, 2 LAW LIBR. J. 4, 5 (1909).

2. Kelly Browne, Battle Erupts Over Citation Format, National Law Journal, July 17, 1995.

3. James Evans, San Francisco Daily Journal, January 23, 1996.

4. The formal adoption of this type of public domain citation was also considered but rejected by the Judicial Conference of the United States in 1991. 56 Fed.Reg. 38457.

5. As an example, the Amarillo Court of Appeals' recent opinion in City of Amarillo v. Martin, was assigned a citation of 1995 WL 695195 by West Publishing, 1995 Tex.App. 2963 by Lexis, and 1996.TX.7 (opinion on rehearing) by Lawyers' Legal Research (the motion for rehearing was used in this example because L.L.R. did not add citations to opinions before 1996).

6. Although many current operating systems permit filenames longer than eleven characters, the diversity of systems on which opinions may be used requires that the eleven character restriction be adopted for opinion filenames.