Re: Help! West Publishing seeks broad change in FOIA (fwd)

Timothy Arnold-Moore writes:
>
> Consider two possible citation schemes:
> - Case number, court and paragraph number.
> - Case title, date, court and paragraph number.
>
> These are two vendor-neutral citation systems which do not refer to a
> specific physical source (assuming we have a tight definition of what
> constitutes a paragraph).
>
> If all US courts have ALL judicial decisions available in electronic
> form (via BBS) as is the future plan, then this information is
> sufficient for anybody to locate a copy of the decision. If vendors
> truly add anything to what is provided there, they can index their
> editions using these citations.
>
> >Much of the debate regarding citation form is in effect a debate whether
> >to let citation forms evolve via competition as has been done historically
> >(thus letting the hypothetical LPH use its own citation form instead of
> >having to use anyone else's pages), with legal writers free to cite to
> >any source they find reliable.
>
> But that is not actually what happens if the governement regulates
> for use of a particular citation (i.e. West page numbers). Lets at
> least have something resembling a level playing field if we are going
> to let free enterprise choose!!
>
> >This better fits the free enterprise
> >system under which consumer choice, not government fiat, is believed to
> >produce better results in the long run. Thus, if LPH produces a useful
> >product, people should be free to cite _it_, without any need for
> >cross-references.
>
> How can free-enterprise lead to a better citation system than a
> vendor-neutral, presentation-neutral scheme? How will such a scheme
> come into existence by the operation of free enterprise when it is
> not in the interests of publishers to provide a vendor-neutral
> citation scheme but rather to establish or protect monopolies?
>
> Government intervention is not an evil to be avoided at all cost.
> Governments exist precisely because some intervention is needed some
> of the time. The key is picking when it is in the balance beneficial
> and when it is not. The balance in this situation is firmly in
> favour of intervention so that legal decisions can be made available
> at the minimum total cost to the legal researcher and ultimately the
> consumer of legal advice.
>
> A beautiful example of free-enterprise leading to a completely
> self-seeking and inefficient process is the free-enterprise land
> title transfer mess operating in many US jurisdictions.
> Last century, an Australian (Torrens) invented a central registory
> system (variants of which have since been adopted widely elsewhere
> in the world) for recording land ownership and transfers.
> Transfer and title checks can be done very cheaply with great
> certainty because the government intervened and put and end to the
> endless checking of the chain of title.
>
> Contrast this to much of the US where the cost of a title search or
> transfer of land (not the cost of legal advice, just the
> administrative costs) has always been orders of magnitude higher.
> [this may have changed recently by computerisation but I doubt it]
>
> Why? Because it is not in the interests of the free-enterprise that
> controls the system to provide the service any cheaper and
> free-enterprise does not have the flexibility to change the law
> to fit a new scheme that legislators have.
>
> Common sense must prevail here and government intervention is, in
> this particular case, the fastest way of achieving the common sense
> solution.

I favor a uniform system of citation. I have two problems. First, we must assume that the government (and in the U.S. preferably all governments) choose the the same system and that system makes sense. Second, and more importantly, there exists the problem of how to handle already existing documents that are only stored by Westlaw or Lexis. For years to come we will have to find ways of citing these older cases. One could quite easily download the West materials and number the paragraphs but that act might either violate copyright law or more likely the licensing agreement with West. Until some explains how we deal with this problem the uniform citation system only seems to be a partial fix.

  Don Berman --  

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