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.
Poulin and LexUM were also influential in creating
a neutral citation system for case law in Canada.
Not exact matches
The
neutral citation serves the purpose of bringing the whole
system under one roof again because it is a creation of the judicial
system itself, like the docket number, etc..
The
neutral citation probably was conceived with the idea of bringing some order to the proliferating «
citation»
systems in mind: OJ, QJ, SCJ, CarswellOnt, AZ, JE, Lexis, ad infinitum.
CanLII has created its own
citation system to address certain historical limitations of the
system, but CanLII cites follow the
neutral citation very closely.
The
system only works if every decision receives a
neutral citation.
in scanned PDF format, all freely available on AustLII, but also in developing a uniform and vendor -
neutral system of legal
citation for them.
The
neutral citation creates a gateway to all
systems whereas commercial
citations to commercial sites are inherently obscure.
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.
Moreover, setting Oklahoma apart from other
neutral citation pioneers, the judiciary staff applied
neutral citations retrospectively to all prior decisions rendered during the print era, placed copies of them online as well, and encouraged but did not require that they also be cited by the new
system.
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.