Courts urged to adopt neutral citation standards
(Reprinted with permission of Law Times)



By Julius Melnitzer
For Law Times
The Canadian Judicial Council has urged all Canadian Courts to adopt the Canadian Citation Committee's neutral citation standard for case law (NCS) as soon as possible.

The NCS, recently made available at http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/citation/en, allows court registries to assign neutral, uniform and unique identifiers to judgements immediately upon their issue, without reference to specific publishers, databases or report series.

According to University of Montreal law professor Daniel Poulin, the CCC's co-ordinator, the need for a citation standard has assumed some urgency as a result of recent changes in case law reporting.

Formerly, independent publishers controlled the transcription, editing and publication of court decisions, using various citation criteria to define their own series of law reports and databases.

Courts, however, now tend to "take charge of their own decisions," even publishing directly on the Internet. The Canadian judiciary has lacked a citation method allowing courts to identify self-published decisions in an official and permanent way. Consequently, the citation of "unreported" judgments or judgments "not yet reported" has ben somewhat haphazard.

The CCC, which included representatives of court administrations, law libraries, legal publishers and law societies, received more than 60 detailed comments from interested parties after publishing its NCS working documents on the Internet.

The Canadian neutral citation initiative follows on the American Bar Association's development of a similar mechanism. Eleven states have adopted the ABA proposal and four others are considering following suit. In Australia, the country's high court has adopted a standard modeled on the ABA's recommendations.

No international standard, however, has yet been developed.

The Canadian standard has three essential elements:

Poulin says that a neutral citation standard will facilitate the implementation of electronic research tools; allow case law users to access specific references without necessarily having available the same law reports used by particular authors; and "consolidate the public nature of case law."

Legal publishers will also benefit, according to Poulin. A national citation standard, he says, will permit the integration of multiple publications, simplify collection management, favour the immediate publication of case law and offer an official method of referencing unpublished decisions.

National implementation of the NCS will be "progressive," says Poulin, who expects the neutral citation will appear, at least initially, as a parallel citation to more traditional references.

The key to the pace of adoption, however, lies with the Supreme Court of Canada. That court's quick embrace of the CJC's 1996 standard for the judgments in electronic form, for example, heralded acceptance by the "vast majority" of the country's superior courts.

"I wouldn't say that the high court is in the first wave of converts to the neutral citation standard right now", Poulin says, "but the court's quite interested in the standard and Claude Marquis, the court's editor, has given us a lot of input."

Currently, judges in British Columbia's Supreme Court and the province's Court of Appeal have started to use the NCS. And Alberta has adopted the standard on its recently developed Web site for judicial decisions.

In Ontario and Quebec, Poulin expects a more formalized, centralized adoption of the NCS "all at once."

We have good relations with Ontario's Integrated Justice Project," Poulin says, "They are looking at overall file management and I expect that they'll incorporate the standard as part of the overall project."

Similarly, Quebec justice officials have made a"good commitment" to the NCS.

Lawyers can also expect the standard to appear on the Web sites of various administrative tribunals as early as this summer.

Law Times, July 19 - July 25 1999