Case citation
"[1] Where cases are published on paper, the citation usually contains the following information: In some report series, for example in England, Australia and some in Canada, volumes are not numbered independently of the year: thus the year and volume number (usually no greater than 4) are required to identify which book of the series has the case reported within its covers.
They can be found through many national and other websites, such as WorldLII and AfricanLII, that are operated by members of the Free Access to Law Movement.
The resulting flood of non-paginated information has led to numbering of paragraphs and the adoption of a medium-neutral citation system.
In common law countries with an adversarial system of justice, the names of the opposing parties are separated in the case title by the abbreviation v (usually written as v in Commonwealth countries and usually as v. in the U.S.[2]) of the Latin word versus, which means against.
Solicitor General Ken Starr even managed to use all three of the most common American pronunciations interchangeably:[9] This is the process of analysis that is quite familiar to the Court, very lengthily laid out by Justice Harlan in his dissent in Poe versus Ullman, and then adumbrated in his concurring opinion in Griswold against Connecticut.
A widely used guide to Australian legal citation is the Australian Guide to Legal Citation, commonly known as AGLC, published jointly by the Melbourne University Law Review and the Melbourne Journal of International Law.
[11] Since the late 1990s, however, much of the legal community has converged to a single standard—formulated in The Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation / Manuel canadien de la référence juridique,[12] commonly known as the "McGill Guide" after the McGill Law Journal, which first published it.
Citations of decisions published in a reporter usually consist of the name or abbreviation of the reporter, the year or volume, the page number where the decision begin (sometimes followed by an identifying number if more than one judgment is on a page), as well as the name or abbreviation of the court which decided the case.
The database is expected to implement the European Case Law Identifier, which will make uniform, neutral citations of decisions possible.
If decisions are not yet published by the court, or will not be published at all, law journals can be cited, e.g., Where NJW stands for the law journal Neue Juristische Wochenschrift, 2009 is the year, 1234 the page of the beginning and 1235 the cited page(s) – "f." stands for "seq.".
The official collection of the Federal Social Court (Bundessozialgericht, BSG) is abbreviated BSGE [de].
For other courts, generally the same rules apply, though most do not publish an official collection, so they must be cited from a law journal.
While decisions themselves are uploaded by the Supreme Court itself on www.courtnic.nic.in, the edited versions with headnotes in the official reporter take years to compile.
Those citations looked like this: The SCC also have a separate series of subject-based reporting of the decisions of the Supreme Court: National Judicial Reference System (NJRS) is a project started by the Income-tax Department, Government of India.
Within this project the Judicial Research & Reference System (JRRS) – JRRS is a repository of judicial orders as a single, indexed, searchable, cross-linked, database of Judgments / orders of ITAT, Authority of Advance Ruling (AAR), HC and SC.
Additionally, a number of other report series exist for specialist areas such as Family, Employment and Tax Law.
the Philippine Reports has suffered from production problems, resulting in long delays in publication, as well as significant gaps within its published series.
Supreme Court decisions not selected for official publication are cited as Urteil [des Bundesgerichts] 5C.260/2006 vom 30.
Judgments with neutral citations are freely available on the British and Irish Legal Information Institute website (www.bailii.org).
If the Attorney General for England and Wales or the Director of Public Prosecutions (England and Wales) prosecute the case, the abbreviation "AG" or "DPP" will be used instead of "R" Square brackets "[ ]" are used when the year is essential to locating the report (e.g., the official law reports either—as with Donoghue v Stevenson, above—do not have volume numbers or, if there are multiple volumes in a single year, they are numbered 1, 2, etc.).
Round brackets "( )" are used when the year is not essential but is useful for information purposes, e.g., in reports that have a cumulative volume number such as R v Dudley and Stephens, above.
Although a citation to the latter two is not required, some attorneys and legal writers prefer to cite all three case reporters at once: The "2d" after the L. Ed.
[citation needed] Like the United States Supreme Court, some very old state case citations include an abbreviation of the name of either the private publisher or the reporter of decisions, a state-appointed officer who originally collected and published the cases.
An example of a case cited to a reporter that has not been subsequently incorporated into an officially published series is Pierson v. Post, 3 Cai.
Some states, notably California and New York, have their own citation systems that differ significantly from the various federal and national standards.
This is mainly because judges certify only significant decisions for publication, due to the massive number of frivolous appeals flowing through the courts and the importance of avoiding information overload.
[32] It is also argued that this is in part because in many states, especially California, the legislature has failed to expand the judiciary to keep up with population growth (for various political and fiscal reasons).
To deal with their crushing caseloads, many judges prefer to write shorter-than-normal opinions that dispose of minor issues in the case in a sentence or two.
[28] For example, in Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the word "person" as used in the Fourteenth Amendment does not include the unborn.
Since the 1980s, there has been an ongoing debate among American judges as to whether they should relegate such lengthy citations to footnotes to improve the readability of their opinions, as strongly urged by Bryan A. Garner, one of the leading authors on legal writing and style.
