Arkansas and Louisiana, two state systems that, similarly,
adopted neutral citation but sought to avoid paragraph numbering by specifying the pagination in a court - released pdf file as the basis for pinpoint references, have suffered the same fate in research services that, like Google Scholar, base their texts for many jurisdictions on the versions published in the Thomson Reuters National Reporter System.
(It is also weird that there is no updated information as to which courts have
adopted neutral citation and which have not.)
Courts have been tremendously supportive of open access by
adopting the neutral citation, by using reproduction - friendly templates and by adopting favourable dissemination policies.
Not exact matches
This document supersedes the
Neutral Citation Standard, but more information on
Neutral Citation, now
adopted by all Canadian Courts, is available here.
In contrast to Canada, where
neutral citation has been widely
adopted for caselaw, the practice is still not very widespread South of the border:
Adopted by all courts and many tribunals, the
neutral citation allows for the unique identification of a decision, as soon as it is released and regardless of the specific database or report in which it is published.
As has worked in the past, when the
neutral citation system for Canadian courts was created and
adopted, and equally a uniform naming convention for Canadian judgments, I would suggest the work be entrusted to a core working group supported by an advisory board representative of all the affected communities: the Courts (and the Canadian Judicial Council), the law publishers both print and digital (especially CanLII and Lexum), legal writing and research faculty, law librarians and practising lawyers from both our French and English legal communities.
In all U.S. jurisdictions that have
adopted systems of medium
neutral case
citation, the year of a decision is an integral part of its cite or retrieval tag.