Journal of Law, Information and Science
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COLIN FONG[**]
The proliferation of legal materials on the Internet has given rise to the need for uniform standards for the citation of internet materials. The paper examines the issues which need to be addressed in any attempt to develop a uniform style of citation. First, it compares and contrasts citing from the Internet with citing from paper based sources, considering what information a citation from each medium needs to contain. Then the paper considers developments in the United States and Canada, focussing on proposals to develop vendor and medium neutral methods for citing legal materials which could be used for the citation of electronic and paper-based materials, before considering Australian developments in more detail. In particular, it considers the problem of pinpoint citations from electronic sources which are not subdivided into pages. After considering whether approaches used by library science to recognise, describe and evaluate information resources could provide a useful model for the citation of electronic legal materials, the paper concludes by considering the likelihood of reform in Australia.
The advent of the Internet poses a number of issues, particularly in the citation of material. Citation of print materials may or may not be helpful in citing web resources. The Americans are still debating the issue with a number of states’ proposals in operation. The Canadians have developed standards which are already in practice. The High Court of Australia recently announced the introduction of paragraph numbers in their judgments and the use of a medium neutral citation system. The issue of citing Internet legal materials is still being examined.
Prior to 1998, there was no comprehensive guide to citing Australian legal materials. There were chapters in a number of legal research texts plus some guides on the Internet.[1] Within the next four to eight months there should be three,: Legal referencing (Butterworths); Australian guide to uniform legal citation (LBC Information Services) and Australian legal citation - a guide (Prospect). No doubt there will be different views from each of the above authors and it will be interesting to compare the works when they are published.
Before the Internet, Australian legal researchers were exposed to the following sources of electronic legal information:
• Online access such as Info-One, now Butterworths Online; LEXIS; SCALE, now SCALEplus
• CD ROMs such as Lawpac now part of Butterworths; Aunty Abha
• Disks such as Eurofield or from various government printers
To cite many of the above you had a possible choice of:
• Version date for CD ROMs and disks
• The database searched with file/library reference, date of access for online services
• LEXSEE citations for some LEXIS materials
Traditionally, citation of printed material gives information about a number of things as illustrated by the following examples:
Books - Stuhmcke, A Legal referencing, Sydney, Butterworths, 1998; Rozenberg, P Australian guide to uniform legal citation, Sydney, LBC Information Services, 1998; Fong, C Australian legal citation - a guide, St Leonards, NSW, Prospect, 1998
Journal articles: Rozenberg, P Legal citation of electronic information (1997) 5 Australian Law Librarian 38-56
A book citation gives information about who wrote the book, the title, place of publication, publisher, year of publication; a journal citation information about who wrote the journal article, date of publication, volume number, journal title and the number of pages published.
In contrast, Internet/Web documents, for example, may be cited as follows:
Raysman, R & Brown, P Back to the future: debugging the ‘Millenium bug’ <http://www.brownraysman.com/doclib/y2k.html> .
This provides information about the authors, the title of the document, and the Uniform Resource Locator or its address on the Internet. In the above the US is the place of publication as there is no geographic code. As there is no date, it is difficult to evaluate its currency. Due to the nature of the topic it was probably written in the past two to three years. As there is no date in the document, the question arises as to its usefulness.
For the above example an alternative citation was also found which gave more information. It also had a different URL, ie Raysman, R and Brown, P Back to the future:
de-bugging the ‘Millenium bug,’ New York Law Journal, 11 February 1996 <http://www.ljx.com/practice/computer/0211mill.html>
From this citation the authors, the title of the article, the journal title, date of publication, and URL can be ascertained. The latter citation which includes the date seems more useful.
This raises the perennial problem of parallel citations. In this electronic age where material may be available one day and gone the next a parallel citation to the hard copy, if available, should be given. There is however the convenience factor for examiners to access Internet resources from their office, without going to the library, where the cited item may be missing from the shelves ornot be held.
There have been a number of developments both overseas and in Australia.[2]
Much has been written about the transient nature of many Internet resources. For example the LBC Information Services home page used to be:
<http://www.ozemail.com.au/lbc> and then it was <http://www.lbc.com.au> and now it is <http://www.lbc.com.au/lbc/cgi-bin/wrapper3.0?home.html>
Multiply this by the hundreds, if not thousands which have changed in the past few months. Material on the Internet may be on one day and gone the next. A good example is the Internet Law Journal which appeared briefly during 1995 via the LBC Information Services home page. This does not now exist.
For at least the past four to five years, the American legal and librarian fraternity have been debating the need to have medium vendor neutral citations (or a universal citation system) for electronic and paper materials. This means that when seeing a citation, a reader will be able translate it to either paper or electronic resources. The system neither relies on the medium nor the publishers’ particular products. A number of States such as Wisconsin and Ohio have adopted such a format and bodies such as the American Bar Association and the American Association of Law Libraries have also endorsed such proposals. In practice, for case materials it works something along the lines of the following:
Jones v Clinton, 1997 Ark App 23, 12
Here the reader is referred to the twelfth paragraph of the Arkansas Court of Appeals’ twenty third decision in 1997.
This format has not received universal acceptance within the US and the US Judicial Conference Committee on Automation and Technology in August 1997 rejected the American Bar Association’s proposals for a public domain, medium vendor neutral method of citing case law. The Committee received around a thousand submissions on the ABA proposal. The public were overwhelmingly in favour of the proposal and the judiciary largely against it.[3] The Judicial Conference is yet to finalise its recommendations.
In Canada, many courts have a standard form of electronic citation of legal materials. Note the following comment:
“The Canadian Judicial Council ... developed a Standard for the electronic format of judgments and then set about an implementation process. Today virtually every court within the Council’s mandate has either adopted the Standard or is working on implementation.”[4]
Canadian developments were discussed at A National Summit To Solve the Problems of Authenticating, Preserving and Citing Legal Information in Digital Form, 20-22 November 1997 at the Sheraton Hotel, Toronto. Closer to home, Martin Felsky who spent three years as adviser to the Canadian Judicial Council’s Judges Computer Advisory Committee developed a set of standards for electronic judgments. Felsky spoke on “How Canada rewrote the law”, at the New Zealand Law Librarians Group Conference, Auckland, in February 1998.
Presently there are a number of proposals in Australia regarding citing Internet materials.
On the Internet is the High Court Review (Bond University). This is one of the few Internet legal sites which has a citation guide for its own material.[5] The citation guide is available at
<http://Bond.edu.au/Bond/Schools/Law/publications/HCR/citation.html> . Last updated 24 November 1996.
The High Court Review initially, for example, cited its first three articles in 1995 as:
........1995 HCR 1
........1995 HCR 8 and
........1995 HCR 14
The number after ‘HCR’ referred to the page numbers. This was unsatisfactory as the page numbers of the above did not necessarily correspond with someone else’s page numbers either due to different font sizes or laser single sheet printers vis-a-vis continuous feed sheet printers etc.
The publishers of the HCR suggest the following citation method: 1996 HCR 2. The ‘2’ refers to the second article published in 1996. For a pinpoint citation the following citation method is suggested: 1996 HCR 2 at {3} or 1996 HCR 2{3}. The number in braces refers to the paragraph number within the cited article. So the initial citation of an article would be: N Rees and P Fairall, “The Power to Legislate for One - Gregory Wayne Kable v DPP for NSW,” 1995 HCR 4, WWW at
http://bond.edu.au/Bond/Schools/Law/publications/HCR (22 November 1996). Subsequent citations could be abbreviated. For example: N Rees and P Fairall, 1995 HCR 4.
The above does not seem to be concise enough for legal citations. To find the material there is the suggested mode of citation then the URL. The following citations require a two step process in finding them:
ACCR: Australian Consumer Credit Reports, where the current looseleaf pages are in Australian Consumer Credit Law Vol 2 Cases; Administration
ACTR: Australian Capital Territory Reports, which are published with the Australian Law Reports
A Def R: Australian Defamation Reports, which are published in: Tobin, TK & Sexton, MG Australian defamation law and practice
NTR: Northern Territory Reports, which are published with the Australian Law Reports
In each of the above examples once you have worked out the meaning of the abbreviated citation, it is another step to find the relevant reports which are in a sense hidden in another publication. This is true of all looseleaf services which carry law reports, the title of which does not match the title of the service.
The citation of electronic reports of cases has generated the most discussion. In a paper presented to the Information Online & On Disc ‘97 Conference, Sydney, in January 1997, Graham Greenleaf, Andrew Mowbray and Geoffrey King put forward the need for a court-designated case citation standard.[6] They suggested that each case must have:
a unique decision number
unique court descriptors and
continuous paragraph numbering.
The unique decision number is a continuous number allocated by the Court or Tribunal and recommencing each calendar year. Unique court descriptors are needed to distinguish between courts and tribunals, akin to the present method of unique law report citations. Continuous paragraph numbering is needed so researchers can have pinpoint citation. Paragraph numbering is needed as page numbering is print-medium specific. An example was given as follows:
The year of judgment is indicated, followed by the unique decision number then the unique court descriptor being High Court of Australia then the continuous paragraph number. This seems remarkably similar to Computer Law Services CD ROMs which have a unique citation such as:
Wik Peoples v Queensland CLS 1996 HC 156
Note the Computer law Services citation places the unique decision number after rather than before the unique court descriptor. Very few cases are cited from Computer Law Services as such. As usage is an important factor in citation use, this difference could be discounted.
During March 1997, Evan Predavec (Butterworths) put up a proposal on the Australian and New Zealand Law Librarians’ Internet Discussion List.[7] His proposal was as follows:
“(year) - case number - Reports series - [paragraph number in the report] eg 1997-3-ALR-5 denoting the 5th paragraph of the 3rd case published in 1997 in ALR.”
This mode is media/medium neutral but is not vendor neutral. ALR is a reference to Australian Law Reports, a Butterworths publication. If the proposal is adopted by Butterworths then researchers will have to adapt to their suggested mode of citation. It resembled in part the mode of citation discussed above for the High Court Review and the various American forms of electronic citation of court cases.
During January 1998 the High Court of Australia announced it would incorporate paragraph numbers from the delivery of the first judgment in 1998.[8] The announcement mirrors much of the above discussion. However, the new method of citation does differ from the Greenleaf, Mowbray and King proposal, for example the 3rd decision of 1998 appeared as:
Pyrenees Shire Council v Day [1998] HCA 3
In Romeo v Conservation Commission of the Northern Territory [1998] HCA 5 at 106, the High Court cited the above as Pyrenees Shire Council v Day [1998] HCA 3 at 71.
The High Court mode of citation appears inelegant compared to the Greenleaf, Mowbray and King proposal under which the above would appear as: [1998] 3 HCA or for a pinpoint citation as [1998] 3 HCA 71. It appears remarkably similar to the Computer Law Services mode of citation to its judgments, as noted above. The use of “at” appears to be a step back when citing page numbers within law reports or books.
• Presently there are three electronic case citators for Australia:
• Australian Case Citator (LBC)
• CaseBase, also available on Butterworths Online and the Australian Legal Research Library (LBC)
• Hypercite (Computer Law Services, merged with LBC during July 1997)
Basically they all do the same thing. They all provide references to where a case is reported, parallel citations and journal article references. Some provide catchwords and legislation judicially considered. The disappointing feature of Australian case citators is that none of them provide citations to particular points of law.
In the US, by using Shepards citators, you can track down a particular issue in one case and see if that point in the headnote has been judicially considered since. This is done by numbering the paragraphs in the headnote and using the same numbers in subsequent citations.
As the vendor medium neutral standard of case citation is accepted in Australia, we could at last have a similar system to Shepards. Judges could provide pinpoint citations to cases by way of paragraph numbers and these would be used in compiling case citators which provided pinpoint citations. However, it would require the initiative of the judiciary or Australian legal publishers to number their catchwords. Of particular interest is the fact that since the end of 1996 all High Court decisions have catchwords allocated to them. Prior to this, some had catchwords and many did not. The Federal Court of Australia also increasingly has catchwords to their judgments.
However one Australian legal publisher has reacted negatively to the above. “The complexity that citing paragraphs introduces would make our current level of accuracy impossible. We could not check each reference to every paragraph and correlate it to the relevant point of law. Accordingly, Pink Ribbon would probably not use paragraph numbering in its citation.”[9]
Much of the above discussion focussed on journal articles and cases. There is a wealth of Internet material which does not fit into those categories. Books, reports, discussion papers etc require another mode of citation. One buzz word used by librarians recently is that of Metadata. This term relates to data which assists in recognising, describing and evaluating information resources. For years librarians have been using metadata in the form of works such as Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, or Subject headings for the literature of law and international law, andindex to LC K schedules, 3rd ed, 1982 or legal thesauri.
One method used to describe Internet resources is known as the Dublin Core. This has 15 elements:
• Title. Name given to the resource by the creator or publisher eg Australian Legal Citation - a Guide.
• Creator. Person(s) or organisation(s) chiefly responsible for the intellectual content of the resource eg Zariski, A or Murdoch University School of Law.
• Subject. Topic, keywords and phrases describing content of the resource eg Law, International law, Intellectual property, Taxation, etc.
• Description. Textual description of the resource, such as abstract or synopsis.
• Publisher. Organisation responsible for making the resource available eg AustLII, LawNet, Butterworths, LBC Information Services, Prospect, etc.
• Contributors. Person(s) or organisation(s) additional to those mentioned as Creator. Note the acknowledgment to the Law Foundation of NSW on the AustLII site.
• Date. Date the resource was made available in its present form. May include last update.
• Type. Category of resource such as home page, directory, catalogue.
• Format. Data representation such as ASCII.
• Identifier. Unique identifier such as URL or ISBN.
• Source: The work, paper or electronic, from which the work originated
• Language. Language of the resource
• Relation. Relationship to other resources. Includes links to other home pages.
• Coverage. Includes jurisdiction, nature of primary and secondary materials etc
• Rights. Includes information regarding rights management, eg copyright notice.[10]
These elements are useful elements when considering standards for citation of Internet legal materials.
In the past, without libraries and the use of copyright legislation many cultural treasures would have been lost to extinguishment. Presently the National Library of Australia has developed selection criteria for the acquisition of online Australian publications. This project, called PANDORA (Preservation of Networked Documentary Resources of Australia), aims at ensuring online publications are made accessible in the short and long term.
The present debate surrounding citation has been centred mainly around citation of court cases. The likelihood of Australia adopting a model similar to that already in operation in Wisconsin and other US States is dependent largely on the role of the judiciary in this debate. Other stakeholders such as the Australian Institute of Judicial Administration, Law Council of Australia, the major legal publishers, including AustLII and others need to exchange their views on this vexed issue. In 1997, the College of Law held a conference titled ELI 1997: Standards and issues in electronic publication and dissemination of legal information. This should have received more publicity and outcomes resolved.
There still needs to be discussion on the citation of other legal materials such as acts, rules/regulations, parliamentary debates, government reports etc. During October 1997 the Legal Information Standards Council was launched in Sydney. This consists of representatives from legal publishers, government and non-government organisations. One of the purposes of the Council is “To develop technical and publishing standards for electronic legal information delivery in NSW”. Production standards include standards for citation. To develop standards for citation, the Australian Institute of Judicial Administration or the Legal Information Standards Council need to address a number of issues and the various stakeholders should be present to ensure meaningful outcomes.
[*] A revised version of a paper presented to the Virtual Law School: a Practical Reality? Australasian Law Teachers Association Conference, Interest Groups - Law Librarians; Legal Research and Communications. University of Technology, Sydney, Faculty of Law, 4 October 1997. Acknowledgment to Karen Fong for her assistance in preparing this paper for publication.
[**] Research Librarian, University of Sydney Law Library; Librarian, ATAX (Australian Taxation Studies Program), Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales.
[1] Nemes, I & Coss, G Effective legal research, Sydney, Butterworths, 1998 Ch 2 Citation. See also Campbell, E; Fox, R & Kewley, G Students’ guide to legal writing, Leichhardt, NSW, Federation Press, 1998.
[2] Li, X & Crane, NB Electronic styles: a handbook for citing electronic information, 2nd ed, Medford, NJ, Information Today, Inc, 1996; Rozenberg, P, ‘Developing a standard for legal citation of electronic information’, in: Law via the Internet ‘97, First AustLII Conference on Computerisation of Law via the Internet, Proceedings. University of Technology, Sydney, 25-27 June 1997; Wells, A, ‘Enhancing discovery: the role of standards in describing Internet resources’, in: CAUSE in Australasia ‘97: Information Technology - the Enabler, Conference Proceedings, Melbourne, 13-16 April 1997
<http://www.nla.gov.au/staffpaper/enhancin.html>
[3] Tech Committee: ‘Click off ABA’s citation method’, National Law Journal, 11 August 1997 (p A10)
<http://www.ljx.com/topstories/0807new2.html>
[4] Treadwell, J Email to <anz-law-librarians-one@uow.edu.au> 19 September 1997; Judges Computer Advisory Committee of the Canadian Judicial Committee of the Canadian Judicial Council, Standards for the preparation, distribution and citation of Canadian judgments in electronic form, May 1996
<http://www.inforamp.net/~mfelsky/www/standard.htm>
[5] Note also the Web Journal of Current Legal Issues which may be cited as follows: [1997] 3 Web JCLI, where the year is the date of publication and the subsequent number is the volume/issue number.
[6] ‘Law on the Net via AustLII - 14 M hypertext links can’t be right?’ Sydney, 21-23 January 1997.
[7] 13 March 1997.
[8] Introduction of paragraph numbers in court judgments and the use of a medium neutral citation system (January 1998)
<http://www.hcourt.gov.au/medium.html>
[9] Introduction of paragraph numbers in court judgments and the use of a medium neutral citation system (January 1998)
<http://www.hcourt.gov.au/medium.html>
[10] Adapted from Well, A, ‘Enhancing discovery: the role of standards in describing Internet resources’, in: CAUSE in Australasia ‘97: ‘Information Technology - the Enabler’, Conference Proceedings, Melbourne, 13-16 April 1997.
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