These are ACM's thoughtful comments on Public Domain Citations.
jamie
ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTING
Office of US Public Policy
666 Pennsylvania Ave., SE Suite 301
Washington, DC 20003
http://www.acm.org/usacm/
Via electronic mail to: citation@ao.uscourts.gov
March 14, 1997
Appellate Court and Circuit Administration Division
Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts
Suite 4-512
Washington, DC 20544
Re: ABA Citation Resolution
Dear Members of the Judicial Conference,
The US Public Policy Committee of the Association for
Computing (ACM) supports adoption of the standard citation system
for use by federal and state courts as recommended by the American
Bar Association. We believe that the government should enable
citizens access to legislative, judicial and executive branch
information through the Internet and that such information should
be available in standard formats to promote broad and effective
access.
The public domain citation system now under consideration
will promote public access to judicial decisions because it is
media neutral and will support the fast approaching conversion of
reference material of all types. We further believe that by taking
this step the court system of the United States will encourage
courts in other countries to adopt similar changes and thereby
promote greater public access to legal materials around the world.
This effort will also demonstrate to numerous other publishers of
government information that such change is desirable, customer
friendly and easy to accomplish.
The fact that the proposed citation system will enable courts
to publish their decisions immediately, without waiting for a page
based publications process, will provide significant benefits to
those in the legal profession, researchers in many disciplines,
and the general public.
The major operational change proposed is that the court
official producing the decision's text insert paragraph numbers on
each paragraph. This is a feature of most word processing products
and should cause insignificant operational difficulty.
When the proposal is implemented, judges, court officials,
lawyers and the general public will have a consistent, media
neutral text that can be searched electronically and utilized
directly in producing other documents. At the same time, the
existing citation systems will remain available to ensure
continuity and accessibility by those learned in those systems or
restricted to paper based reporting of judicial decisions.
We would appreciate an opportunity to testify on April 3 in
support of the proposal. As an organization of skilled computer
scientists and engineers, the Association for Computing would be
pleased to provide impartial advice on the technical issues of
implementing this proposal. It is a simple, straightforward
proposal, but there may be some technical concerns that we can
answer.
We support immediate implementation of the proposed uniform
standard and appreciate this opportunity to provide our comments
to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Court by the Internet.
Sincerely,
/sig/
Barbara Simons, Chair
US Public Policy Committee,
Association for Computing
/\ /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Association for Computing, + http://www.acm.org/usacm/
office of U.S. Public Policy * +1 202 298 0824 (tel)
666 Pennsylvania Ave., SE Suite 301 * +1 202 547 5482 (fax)
Washington, DC 20003 USA +
---------------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 14 2007 - 20:49:32 PST