Shepard's Citations

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Shepard's Citations is a citator used in United States legal research that provides a list of all the authorities citing a particular case, statute, or other legal authority. [1] The verb Shepardizing (sometimes written lower-case) refers to the process of consulting Shepard's to see if a case has been overturned, reaffirmed, questioned, or cited by later cases. [1] Prior to the development of electronic citators like Westlaw's KeyCite during the 1990s, Shepard's was the only legal citation service that attempted to provide comprehensive coverage of U.S. law. [1]

Contents

History

Shepard's United States Citations Shepard's United States Citations.jpg
Shepard's United States Citations

The name derives from a legal service begun by Frank Shepard (1848–1900) in 1873, when Shepard began publishing these lists in a series of books indexed to different jurisdictions. [1] Initially, the product was called Shepard's Adhesive Annotations. The citations were printed on gummed, perforated sheets, which could be divided and pasted onto pages of case law. Known as "stickers", these were literally torn to bits and stuck to pertinent margins of case reporters.

By the early 20th century, the Frank Shepard Company was binding the citations into maroon volumes with Shepard's Citations stamped in gold on their spines, much like the ones still found on library shelves. [2]

Under the leadership of William Guthrie Packard, the company endured the Great Depression and continued to grow. It moved to Colorado Springs in 1948; in 1951, it adopted the name Shepard's Citations, Inc. [3] In 1966, Shepard's Citations was acquired by McGraw Hill. [4]

In 1996, Shepard's was purchased by Times Mirror and Reed Elsevier (owner of LexisNexis since 1994). [5] In 1998, LexisNexis bought full ownership of Shepard's. [6] After this acquisition, LexisNexis engaged in a "multi-million-dollar Citations Redesign (CR) project" that "redesigned the way we process case law and citations". [2]

Decline of print usage

In March 1999, LexisNexis released an online version, named Shepard's Citation Service. [7] While print versions of Shepard's remain in use, their use is declining. Although learning to Shepardize in print was once a rite of passage for all first-year law students, [2] the Shepard's Citations booklets in hardcopy format are cryptic compared to the online version, because of the need to cram as much information about as many cases in as little space as possible. [1]

Shepard's in paper format consists of long tables of citations (with full case titles omitted) preceded by one or two-letter codes indicating their relationship to the case being Shepardized. [8] [9] Before computer-assisted legal research became widely available, generations of lawyers (and law clerks and assistants) had to manually locate the Shepard's entry for a case, decipher all the cryptic abbreviations, then manually retrieve all the cases that were marked by Shepard's as criticizing or overruling a particular case, to determine whether the later cases had directly overruled that particular case on the specific holding of interest to one's client. [1] In many jurisdictions in the U.S., it is still possible to cite a case as good law even though it has been overruled, as long as it was overruled on another holding and not the specific holding for which it is being cited.

In 2004, market research by LexisNexis indicated that most attorneys and librarians conduct the majority of their research online, but "that there are a number of experienced attorneys, principally in smaller firms, who still prefer print and who are extremely unlikely to change their ways". [2]

The American textbook Fundamentals of Legal Research formerly included a lengthy illustrated explanation of how to use Shepard's in print, but in the 10th edition released in 2015, that section was replaced with a brief explanation that such "detail is unnecessary for the many researchers who have access to one or more online citators". [10] It was followed by a recommendation that researchers without access to an online citator should telephone or email LexisNexis directly for assistance. [10]

Online

LexisNexis and Lexis Advance database users can Shepardize most citations online; cases are displayed with a text link to Shepardize the case and usually also have an icon indicating the status of the case as citable authority. [1] Either the text link or the icon, when clicked or activated, will bring up a full Shepard's report for the case.

The Shepard's report indicates exactly how later cases cited the case being Shepardized with plain English phrases like "followed by" or "overruled" rather than by using the old abbreviations. [1] Additionally, the report shows the full case title (that is, the names of the plaintiff and defendant) and full citation for each of the later cases. This is important because lawyers can usually distinguish criminal from civil cases by looking at the title. Criminal cases (with the exception of habeas corpus cases) are always titled U.S. v. [defendant], People v. [defendant], or State v. [defendant]. Often, a criminal case may cite a civil case for a point of law which a civil litigator does not care about, and vice versa.

Finally, the online report has the convenience of allowing the user to simply click on the hyperlink for any listed case to retrieve it almost instantly (if it is within the user's access plan), whereas users of Shepard's print version had to dash through long law library aisles to retrieve heavy legal reporter volumes, one for each case (and then someone had to put all those volumes back).

While most citations can be Shepardized online, there are some sources that are only Shepardizable in the print Shepard's Citations volumes. Most significant among these are the uncodified United States Statutes at Large, which are treated in the print publication Shepard's Federal Statute Citations but are not Shepardizable online. There are other more specialized sources not as widely used as the Statutes at Large that are included in print Shepard's Citations publications, but not included in the online service.

Influences upon Science Citation Index and Google

In 1960, Eugene Garfield developed Science Citation Index (SCI), which he later expressly acknowledged was heavily influenced in several ways by Shepard's Citations. SCI indexes scientific journal articles, and shows what other articles they have been cited by. SCI also counts the number of citations each article gets, thus forming a citation index of the most-cited articles and journals. [11] In turn, SCI inspired several other scientists to research the possibility of developing superior citation indexes. Examples are the eigenvalue-based method developed by Gabriel Pinski and Francis Narin in 1976 and the PageRank link analysis algorithm using the similar idea created by Sergei Brin and Larry Page, which became the heart of the Google search engine. [12]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">United States Code</span> Official compilation of U.S. federal statutes

The United States Code is the official codification of the general and permanent federal statutes of the United States. It contains 53 titles. The main edition is published every six years by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the House of Representatives, and cumulative supplements are published annually. The official version of these laws appears in the United States Statutes at Large, a chronological, uncodified compilation.

Halsbury's Laws of England is an encyclopaedia of the law in England and Wales. It has an alphabetised title scheme for the areas of law, drawing on authorities including Acts of Parliament of the United Kingdom, Measures of the Welsh Assembly, UK case law and European law. It is written by or in consultation with experts in the relevant field.

Wexis is a humorous portmanteau used to refer to the alleged duopoly of publishing conglomerates that dominate the U.S. legal information services industry – namely, West Publishing and LexisNexis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Westlaw</span> Online legal research service

Westlaw is an online legal research service and proprietary database for lawyers and legal professionals available in over 60 countries. Information resources on Westlaw include more than 40,000 databases of case law, state and federal statutes, administrative codes, newspaper and magazine articles, public records, law journals, law reviews, treatises, legal forms and other information resources.

LexisNexis is an American data analytics company headquartered in New York, New York. Its products are various databases that are accessed through online portals, including portals for computer-assisted legal research (CALR), newspaper search, and consumer information. During the 1970s, LexisNexis began to make legal and journalistic documents more accessible electronically. As of 2006, the company had the world's largest electronic database for legal and public-records–related information. The company is a subsidiary of RELX.

LexisNexis Quicklaw is a Canadian electronic legal research database that catalogues court decisions, news reports, provincial and federal statutes, journals, and other legal commentary. The database also includes a case citator and case digests. In 2002, Quicklaw was purchased by LexisNexis and is now a subsidiary of LexisNexis Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HeinOnline</span> Online database for legal materials

HeinOnline (HOL) is a commercial internet database service launched in 2000 by William S. Hein & Co., a Buffalo, New York publisher specializing in legal materials. The company was founded in Buffalo, New York, in 1961, and is currently based in nearby Getzville, New York. In 2013, WSH Co. was the 33rd largest private company in western New York, with revenues of around $33 million and more than seventy employees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Law report</span> Type of series of books that contain case law

Law reports or reporters are series of books that contain judicial opinions from a selection of case law decided by courts. When a particular judicial opinion is referenced, the law report series in which the opinion is printed will determine the case citation format.

Legal research is "the process of identifying and retrieving information necessary to support legal decision-making. In its broadest sense, legal research includes each step of a course of action that begins with an analysis of the facts of a problem and concludes with the application and communication of the results of the investigation."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Law library</span> Special library for legal research

A law library is a special library used by law students, lawyers, judges and their law clerks, historians, and other scholars of legal history in order to research the law. Law libraries are also used by people who draft or advocate for new laws, e.g. legislators and others who work in state government, local government, and legislative counsel offices or the U.S. Office of Law Revision Counsel and lobbying professionals. Self-represented, or pro se, litigants also use law libraries.

Halsbury's Statutes of England and Wales provides updated texts of every Public General Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, Measure of the Welsh Assembly, or Church of England Measure currently in force in England and Wales, as well as a number of private and local Acts, with detailed annotations to each section and schedule of each Act. It incorporates the effects of new Acts of Parliament and secondary legislation into existing legislation to provide a consolidated "as amended" text of the current statute book.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">West (publisher)</span> American publisher of legal materials

West is a business owned by Thomson Reuters that publishes legal, business, and regulatory information in print, and on electronic services such as Westlaw. Since the late 19th century, West has been one of the most prominent publishers of legal materials in the United States. Its headquarters is in Eagan, Minnesota; it also had an office in Rochester, New York, until it closed in 2019, and it had an office in Cleveland, Ohio, until it closed in 2010. Organizationally, West is part of the global legal division of Thomson Reuters.

West's National Reporter System (NRS) is a set of case law reporters for federal courts and appellate state courts in the United States. It started with the North Western Reporter in 1879 which has its origin in The Syllabi.

The United States Congressional Serial Set began in 1817 as the official collection of reports and documents of the United States Congress. The collection was published in a "serial" fashion, hence its name. It has been described as the "nation's most treasured publication" and beloved by librarians as "part of their most valued holdings."

In legal research, a citator is a citation index of legal resources, one of the best-known of which in the United States is Shepard's Citations. Given a reference of a legal decision, a citator allows the researcher to find newer documents which cite the original document and thus to reconstruct the judicial history of cases and statutes. A citator can also be used to determine whether a statute or regulation has been amended, repealed, superseded, or held unconstitutional. Using a citator in this way is colloquially referred to as "Shepardizing".

Legal research is the process of identifying and retrieving information to support legal arguments and decisions. Finding relevant legal information can be challenging and may involve the use of electronic research tools as well as printed books and materials. However, many resources that are useful for legal research are fee-based, and many are not easily accessible.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JustCite</span>

JustCite is an online legal research platform from Justis Publishing Ltd. It is designed to help users find leading authorities and establish the current status of the law.

Frank Shepard was a salesman for a Chicago legal publisher who invented the Shepard's legal citation system.

A table of authorities is part of a legal brief that contains an index of the cases, statutes, and secondary sources cited. This article deals specifically with the characteristics of tables of authorities in the United States. The table of authorities, often called a TOA, is frequently a legal requirement for litigation briefs; the various state courts have different rules as to what kinds of briefs require a TOA. The TOA list has the name of the authority followed by the page number or numbers on which each authority appears, and the authorities are commonly listed in alphabetical order within each grouping. The intention is to allow law clerks and judges to easily and rapidly identify and access the legal authorities cited in a litigation brief.

The law of Illinois consists of several levels, including constitutional, statutory, and regulatory law, as well as case law and local law. The Illinois Compiled Statutes (ILCS) form the general statutory law.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Mersky, Roy M.; Dunn, Donald J. (2002). Fundamentals of Legal Research (8th ed.). New York: Foundation Press. pp. 312–340. ISBN   9781587780646.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Morris, Jane W. (May 2004). "The Future of Shepard's Citations in Print" (PDF). The Newsletter on the Committee of Relations with Information Vendors. Vol. 26, no. 3. American Association of Law Librarians. p. 3.
  3. ↑ "Appeal of P.S. Docket No. 1/88e". United States Postal Service. Archived from the original on June 6, 2011.
  4. ↑ "The McGraw-Hill Companies Timeline" . Retrieved August 23, 2014.
  5. ↑ Lee, Patrick (July 4, 1996). "Times Mirror to Boost Its Legal Publishing Unit with Shepard's". Los Angeles Times . ISSN   0458-3035 . Retrieved August 23, 2014.
  6. ↑ Barringer, Felicity (July 28, 1998). "The Media Business: Times Mirror Sells Legal Unit to British–Dutch Publisher". The New York Times . ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved August 23, 2014.
  7. ↑ Rebollo, Robyn (August 31, 1999). "One More Look at Shepard's Citation Service: A Private Law Librarian's Perspective". LLRX: Law and Technology Resources for Legal Professionals.
  8. ↑ Putman, William H.; Albright, Jennifer R. (2014). Legal Research (3rd ed.). Stamford, Connecticut: Cengage Learning. p. 221. ISBN   9781305147188 . Retrieved 14 December 2020.
  9. ↑ Bouchoux, Deborah E. (2020). Legal Research Explained (5th ed.). New York: Wolters Kluwer. p. 374. ISBN   9781543801644.
  10. 1 2 Barkan, Steven M.; Bintliff, Barbara A.; Whisner, Mary (2015). Fundamentals of Legal Research (10th ed.). St. Paul, Minnesota: Foundation Press. p. 321. ISBN   9781609300562.
  11. ↑ "Discovering Shepard's Citations". Web of Stories. Interview with Eugene Garfield.
  12. ↑ "Hypersearching the Web". Scientific American . June 1999 – via Cornell University.

Further reading

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