Just look at our award-winning Minnesota Legislature site. Minnesota State Law Librarian Barbara Golden calls it the best legislative web site in the country.
Law is so important to civilization that courts hold that everybody is irrebuttably presumed to know it. But we know that, by and large, they don't actually know it, or know how to use it, or even how to find it, don't we?
Here's a simple question. As a branch of government, don't courts have a duty to make their part of the law as accessible as possible? Shouldn't the courts be actively working to lower or eliminate unnecessary barriers, especially ones they perpetuate, to the law they themselves write?
But wait, says Mr. Status Quo.
Mr. Quo says it is perfectly reasonable that if you want to know judge-made law, you can pay money to subscribe to it. Or you can travel to those few physical edifices where the law is kept in thousands and thousands of impressive bound volumes. Or you can sit down in said edifice to commune with the law for a bit on the edifice's designated computers because they have paid for limited patron access already. Or you can pay someone else to find out what the law might be and tell you about it.
Mr. Quo would say if Volume 1 of Northwest Reporter was good enough in 1879, then Volume 719 N.W.2d ought to be good enough for 2006. It is, after all, accessible by computer now.
If we expect people to abide by the law, to follow the rules, then we have to do more than give them FAQs. We have to give them the real deal in a reasonably usable manner. How much money you have or how much of a legal insider you are should not determine how much access you have to the core primary law you are irrebuttably deemed charged with knowing. Talk about a Catch-22 situation!
The citation form under which it is published is part of it. But most important is the underlying philosophy expressed by the legal and judicial community. Do we see this as a priority? Or as an annoyance?
One can look to some of our sister states to see a palpable difference in how much more accessible case law can be than it currently is in Minnesota. Check out Wisconsin, North and South Dakota, and Oklahoma for starters. Check out why both the American Bar Association and the American Association of Law Libraries, years ago, called on all states to introduce universal citation form and continue to do so.
If universal citation were being introduced today, people would call it public domain citation or open source citation. That has always been the concept, along with medium neutrality and publisher neutrality.
The universal citation is used as a parallel permanent citation that slips in beside 719 N.W.2d xxx, just like the old official citations did.
For a Minnesota Supreme Court case, a universal citation would look like this: 2006 MN 85 -- designating the 85th Minnesota Supreme Court case decided in 2006.
All the courts have to do is announce the new citation system, put the new citations on their opinions when issued, and use those cites, when available, in referring to prior case law. The traditional book-based cites can still be used in parallel too.
The goal is not to create confusion but to reduce it. Citation reform is one necessary bridge to the future waiting to be built. It is one we have neglected building for too long in Minnesota already.
But how about "pinpoint" cites? Number each paragraph of an opinion, and your pinpoint cites will be even more dead-on pinpoint.
It is useful to compare current case law citation practices to statutory citation practices. Statutes have never been locked into a particular physical book or page.
If you are, for example, interested in the Minnesota Supreme Court's power to appoint its own janitor, go to Minn. Stat. § 480.10, wherever it may be found, in print, on CD-Rom, or the Internet. The Revisor of Statutes wisely publishes that very section under a URL that lets you immediately identify it: http://www.revisor.leg.state.mn.us/stats/480/10.html.
The State Law Library does a wonderful job of publishing Minnesota Supreme Court and Court of Appeals decisions on the Internet. But the constraints of the citation system itself limit the utility of its work by making its collection of tens of thousands of opinions less effective than it could and should be.
There is no convenient way to find a case by citation because the N.W.2d citation is nowhere associated with the case as published.
But that is putting the question backward. Here is the real question. Why in 2006 should we only be able to find cases by using a citation to a book virtually no one uses in book form anymore?
I recently inquired at the Hennepin County Law Library about patrons' preferences for electronic case law research vs. book-based research. The answer: 90% prefer electronic. Elderly attorneys tend to still prefer books.
Winthrop & Weinstine's Nancy Evans, speaking in September at a local legal seminar, observed that her firm's 2006 summer associate class, drawn from Minnesota law schools, was the first to have never had to use books in law school.
Law firms and many law libraries are literally throwing their print case books out or giving them away for the price of postage. Electronic access has won. There is no going back, only ahead.
We need a system of case law accessibility that is designed for the realities of 2006 and the years to come. That's why it's time to put case law citation reform on the Minnesota agenda.
LaVern Pritchard is the owner and founder of Pritchard Law Webs, Minneapolis, Minnesota and the publisher of LawMoose, www.lawmoose.com.
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