Talk:Case citation

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[edit] Medium neutral citation

"Some courts have done away with volume numbers entirely. The Supreme Court of Ireland cites cases by year and page number; e.g. Aer Rianta Cpt v. Ryanair Ltd., [2004] IESC 24 (2 April 2004)." I doubt that this is an example of the Supreme Court of Ireland ideosynchratically decided to 'do away with volume numbers'; it is not courts who publish volumes of law reports, it is legal publishers. I think that this is likely to be an example of medium neutral citation. See, for more about this, the standards published by the Law Foundation of Australia. This page does need a separate section explaining Medium neutral citation, I suspect.SilasM 05:32, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

No-one has leapt to the defence of the formulation I criticised back in january. I'm going to delete that sentence.--SilasM 09:32, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] State court citation

Hello to Hydriotaphia:

Actually, the citations for the New York and California courts were correct, so I'm changing them back. If you read through recent opinions from the Web sites of the New York Court of Appeal and the California Supreme Court, you'll see what I mean. Just download any three or four opinions at random.

I just double-checked to be absolutely sure I'm right on this point. Here are the URLs:

http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/

http://www.courts.state.ny.us/ctapps/latdec.htm

It's important to be aware that many states have very different citation systems. Unless you plan to engage in purely transactional practice (in which case you don't need to know about court citation), you don't want to get admitted pro hac vice to argue some client's important case to the supreme courts of California or New York, and then give the middle finger to the justices (or judges, in New York) by using the Bluebook citation system in your briefs. To them, it looks like you confused them with the federal courts, and the last thing you want to do is remind them that they're not federal judges!

They might forgive you if you're slick at oral argument, but it's a lot easier to show respect for the courts to begin with.

--Coolcaesar 06:23, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Merge from Citation (legal cases) to Court citation #England and Wales

Have merged citation (legal cases) into this article - it was mostly redundant - and will make that page a redirect. I query whether:

  1. the section which is now "simple examples" is needed at all
  2. external links should be at the bottom of the page rather than at the end of #England and Wales.

I've left them both as they are, for now. AndyJones 16:39, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Title of this page

Following discussion between myself and User:mmmbeer was on Citation (legal cases), before the merge. Does anyone have any thoughts? My personal preference would be to reverse the merge: make this page "Citation (legal cases)" or similar, and have "Court citation" as the redirect. However, are the terms are used differently in North America? AndyJones 16:53, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Legal citation

There is also an article Legal citation, should we consider a merge? Mmmbeer 19:25, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

  • Yes, and also there's Court citation, linked from Legal citation. I think if I'd been aware of that page I wouldn't have created this one, although in fact "court citation" is not something we say in the UK, and there were no links to it from "citation" which is why I thought this article was necessary. When I have more time, possibly tomorrow, I'll see if there's anything in this article that can usefully be merged to "court citation". This page can then become the redirect. AndyJones 23:55, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
    • Yeah, I'm not thrilled with "court citation" either. If anything it's "case citation" or something of the sort. I think that there's lots of overlap among others too. Mmmbeer 01:03, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
      • OK, done that. I left the message (above) on Court citation. I will copy this discussion there, too. AndyJones 16:53, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
        • I would support either a rename to case citation or a merge with legal citation. Court citation just sounds funny to Americans (although I don't know if it actually sounds right to lawyers in Commonwealth countries). --Coolcaesar 03:33, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
          • Absolutely not. I qualified in the UK, and I assumed the page was here because that's what an American would call the subject. I'll make the move today or tomorrow. AndyJones 11:44, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Date

This article says that the date is the date when the opinion was published, but I believe it is more likely that it is the decision date, not the publishing date. In rare instances, cases are decided, but not published until a little while later. Is this a {{sofixit}}, or do you think I have erred? --LV (Dark Mark) 21:47, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Article split

It may not be necessary right now, but I think sooner or later it may be wise to create sub-articles for each country's style such as Case citation in the United States, case citation in Canada, and so forth. The potential for detail in each country's citation style may result in a huge article when finished. This may be particularly necessary as each country often cites other countries' cases differently. Say for, example, when writing about an Australian or English case in a North American country the "v" has a period (such as John v. Smith) even though the native country will cite the case without the period (John v Smith).PullUpYourSocks 15:53, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

  • I tend to agree with PUYS. Having just added a section of New Zealand, it occurrs to me that this section could substantiate an article in itself with consideration of histroical report series, online reporting and other points.203.173.140.82 04:55, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Should there be a link to the UK free legal database, or just commercial ones?

AndyJones,

It saddens me that you would find it more appropriate to delete a link to annother free info database because it has been denied public documents (judgments) by the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting, rather than write to the Council and use your efforts to have them release the copyright. AustLII had similar problems until enough people supported it - indeed even Wikipedia was limited to start with. Is it not time to send people to the site so that they can complain that the common law of England is copyrighted to the Incorp council of law reporting who (with your favoured commercial link sites) will charge them a fee if they want to know the law (which, of course, they are presumed to know).

But, it is not for an Australian lawyer to emancipate the Brits. I leave it for you to restore the BAILII link, unless you think that we should all be denied awareness of the free access legal database of the UK because it is presently crippled by the Incorp Council.

Regards FedLawyer 13:45, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

What the hell? I was already alarmed when I learned in law school about how the U.K. until very recently had no separation of powers at its highest court level and how general warrants are still allowed there (they are outlawed in the United States by the particularity clause of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution). Now I'm really glad that I practice in a jurisdiction where the courts have always held that there is no copyright in the law — because American copyright protects creativity, not mere labor! --Coolcaesar 01:37, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
Not wishing to intrude too much on the self-congratulatory flag-waving, but... Firstly, the conventions of the British constitution mean the House of Lords has kept its legislative and judiciary powers separate since 1844, and nobody has tried to tamper with that arrangement since 1883, so the problem which "alarmed" you isn't exactly "until very recently", and if the idea of having the equivalents of the Senate and Supreme Court have the same name and be located in different bits of the same building is too terrifying, don't worry yourself too much - the Law Lords are moving to a new "Supreme Court" in a couple of years' time. Secondly, I have no idea what the modern British legal equivalent of the "general warrant" you refer to might be (it's not a term I've ever come across in practice), but if you're concerned about the rules governing warrants in Britain I'd suggest you have a look at PACE 1984, as well as considering whether the Fourth Amendment ban on said warrants is so terribly important when held up alongside the provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act and indefinite detention without trial. Finally, moving on to the issue actually under discussion... Although very frustrating, it's the ICLR's own reports which are copyrighted, not "the law" itself (hence the appearance of many alternative series of law reports, including the ones on BAILII) - and as well as containing some element of creativity (specifically the headnotes and summaries), they should be considered privately-funded research, rather than publically-available knowledge - unless you count the collection, compilation and collation of all research as "mere labor"? I should perhaps note that I wholeheartedly approve of BAILII, and agree there should be a link on the article.
Notwithstanding someone's abuse of me, above, I had in fact allowed a link to BAILII to remain in the article, here. I agree with your general point, though. AndyJones 19:21, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Order of entries

Hey wikipedians, could we please consider placing the entries on this article in alphabetical order? Its a bit ridiculous to have the USA at the top. I could ratonalise England being at the top, since that's the cradle of the Common Law, but its not. I think it reflects a US bias. You might argue that the US has a longer entry than the others. But the way the article is currently constructed seems to place England, Australia and Canada as mere afterthoughts and side-notes. They're unlikely to get attention (and expansion) in that way. An An 22:25, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Go for it Anna - or make them seperate pages like the German one (though the intro may need a bit of reworking ot to that. FedLawyer 06:32, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

I've got no objection to that. BD2412 T 13:55, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
Neither do I, as long as the resulting article is as internally coherent as the article in its present state. I've seen too many articles grow out of control thanks to well-intentioned edits, which is why I recently researched and rewrote Lawyer from scratch. And then I looked at Attorney at law and realized that had become a mess (starting with the incorrect spelling; it should be attorney-at-law). --Coolcaesar 07:27, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] How do you pronounce v?

I just stumbled across an interesting question while reading the article on Jarndyce and Jarndyce. How does everyone actually read case names out loud in their jurisdiction? This is probably quite relevant to the article. For example, in my experience, California lawyers usually just say the letter "v," (as in "vee") although I've also heard "versus" and "against." I think one law school professor did say "and" but that was because he studied law in London. --Coolcaesar 01:41, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

In a country like Canada--and presumably this was inherited from the UK--you pronounce a civil case like Smith v Jones as "Smith and Jones", but for criminal cases you would call R. v. Smith, "Arr Vee Smith". It's an odd distinction I never really understood. --PullUpYourSocks 03:52, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
In the United States acceptable pronuncations of the "v." in "Roe v. Wade" or "Furman v. Georgia" is "Vee" or "Versus." Whether it is a civil or criminal case is irrelevant. There are also probably numerous alternative methods as well, but these would be the most common by far. --Tim4christ17 13:10, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
Yes, in Britain you hear all of these. "And" is probably most common, but you often hear "vee" and "against". AndyJones 13:22, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
In England and Wales, it is spoken as 'and' in civil cases and most commonly 'against', but sometimes 'versus' or 'vee' in criminal cases. There are some exceptions to this, for example judicial review is a civil procedure however since the crown brings the case they are often spoken as if they are criminal cases.BaseTurnComplete 14:14, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

“In Australia and England, the ‘v’ between the parties is pronounced ‘and’ in a civil action and ‘against’ in a criminal action. It is not pronounced ‘versus’ as it is in the United States of America.” -- Australian Guide to Legal Citation 2nd Ed p.31

Now I know very little about legal citation in England so I won’t comment any further on that, but in Australia the above statement is largely true. It’s considered a faux pas to say ‘vee’ or ‘versus’ (although you occasionally hear people say ‘and’ for criminal cases and vice versa.) Joaq99 11:35, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Year at end or just after names of parties

I was just looking through some old volumes of the Federal Supplement in the county law library and realized that American citations used to put the year right after the names of the parties until 1961, when there was a sudden switch to putting them at the end and in parentheses. Does anyone know why this happened? I suspect it was probably the Bluebook making yet another weird arbitrary change in its rules, but I'm not sure. --Coolcaesar 06:06, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Should we be putting so many reporter abbreviations into this article?

We have to remember that Wikipedia is for a general audience, not lawyers. User:Dominic.sedghi just inserted a huge number of abbreviations for English law reports. While I appreciate the sentiment, the problem is that if we start doing that, then American editors will insist on inserting abbreviations for the giant number of American reporters. We have anywhere from 30 to 50 important reporters (the exact number depends upon whether one considers the official reporters for the smaller states to be "important"), and between 100 to 200 minor reporters for courts of limited jurisdiction and administrative agencies. For example, the huge Division of Workers' Compensation of the California Department of Industrial Relations has its own unofficial reporter, California Compensation Cases (cited as Cal. Comp. Cases). And I'm sure Canada and Australia have similarly complex systems. It seems to me we should limit this article to the most notable reporters like U.S., All E.R., C.L.R., and so on. --Coolcaesar 22:44, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Is there some small number of places that we can link to where all of this info would be available? Or can we create such a place somewhere outside this article? It's useful, we should provide access to it somewhere. - Jmabel | Talk 21:32, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
Perhaps it would be a good idea to create a list for all reporter abbreviations and have links there from here. Then we can keep this article limited to the reporters for the most important courts. --Coolcaesar 04:12, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
That's a good idea (assuming someone from the relevant jurisdictions is prepared to take on the work). I agree this is useful information, but that this article would be swamped by a complete list. For the UK, for example, I think it would be fine if this article just listed W.L.R., AllER, and each of the current series of the official reports. The rest could be in the new article.AndyJones 12:16, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Example formats

There seem to be two different formats being used for examples in the article: one with a sample citation in large type, followed by bulleted explanations of each part (used in the sections on the U.S. and the Philippines), and one using table syntax (used in the section on Australia, for one).

But where there is likely to be confusion, as in the two New Zealand examples, the examples given in the latter format do not give any guidance. Similarly, for the Australia example, one might ask why the "[year of reporter]" field is left blank. --zenohockey 05:20, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

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