The “green book” — the Texas Rules of Form style guide for Texas citations — is up for revision, and its editors at the Texas Law Review want your input.
Comments should be sent to Rex Mann at the law review. His contact information is here. Comments are requested by October 31, 2009.
Some ideas that warrant discussion:
- A way to cite unpublished cases in Texas outside of a paid research service. When not all courts in Texas even buy the same service, it would sure be nice to be able to cite those (precedential) opinions from their web locations. (I wrote before about researching those unpublished opinions online.)
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The future role of Texas’s unique system of subsequent history. The Texas Supreme Court in practice does not use “petition refused” (which would bless the court of appeals opinion as its own), and “petition denied” status does not make the lower court’s decision binding on any other courts. (( In fact, in the modern petition for review system, there’s no way to tell from “pet. denied” what issue was even presented to the Supreme Court, so there’s no way to know the Court was even asked about the proposition of law you’re citing that case for. )) Yet practitioners go through a remarkable amount of effort to pick out just the right flavor of subsequent history. (( The more subtle differences may affect future litigation between the parties actually involved in that case, but they rarely affect the precedential status of an opinion for nonparties. ))
If you have ideas that you want to see explored more on this blog, please put them in the comment threads (or email them to me privately).
3 responses so far ↓
1 Jeff N. // Sep 22, 2009 at 10:39 pm
Just thinking about where we’re heading. It seems inevitable that electronic briefing will dominate over paper briefs in the near future, in which case hyperlinking to the official online opinion would be the most elegant way to cite most opinions. In that event, is it possible the Green Book and Blue Book would lose most of their value?
I would prefer that didn’t happen. Having an authoritative citation manual makes brief-writing easier, even if the rules are often arbitrary and (as they historically have done) have furthered West’s monopoly over the citation of case law.
The expense of Westlaw is difficult to justify to many clients these days. At the rates charged private firms, it and Lexis are unreasonably and unnecessarily expensive.
I favor a citation form that is based on the courts’ official websites. If the Green Book were to assume a leadership role in this direction, it would seem that more courts would be encouraged to make their cases more easily searchable and accessible online. And the Green Book will remain relevant.
2 Kendall Gray // Sep 23, 2009 at 8:31 am
Ah, just revel in the appellate geekiness. I agree with the prior comment that it would be nice to have a uniform convention for citing unpublished cases that refers to the court’s own slip opinion and potentially links to the slip opinion on the court’s own cite. However, many (possibly most) of us research through a commercial vendor, Westlaw or Lexis would have to carry pagination information for the courts’ slip opinions to make this workable.
3 Don Cruse // Sep 23, 2009 at 8:59 am
Kendall,
You’re right, and the real barrier would be a business one, not a technical one. West and Lexis include parallel citations for many courts. Adding them for unpublished Texas cases should be easy.
Their paying customers would benefit, too. It would be easier for a Westlaw subscriber to look up cases cited by an opposing counsel who otherwise would be using the proprietary LEXIS cite. And it would be easier for courts to look up both sides’ unpublished (but still precedential) cases.
Jeff,
You raise a really interesting point about electronic briefs. There are two halves: (1) how do we write cites for human readers? and (2) how do those cites work with electronic devices? I had been thinking about the first without considering the potential of the second.
I’d like to think about that some more.