New on VoxPopuLII: Minick on Universal Citation for State Codes

[Rob Richards]

Courtney Minick, Esq., of Justia has posted Universal Citation for State Codes, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Ms. Minick criticizes traditional U.S. legal citation standards for reinforcing major commercial publishers' dominant positions in the U.S. legal publishing market, and inhibiting public access to the law.

Ms. Minick describes the American Association of Law Libraries' (AALL's) Universal Citation Guide -- a vendor- and format-neutral legal citation standard -- and its potential for fostering competition and innovation in legal publishing, as well as improving public access to legal resources. Ms. Minick also observes that a new organization -- UniversalCitation.org -- has launched an effort to increase usage of neutral legal citation standards in the U.S.

Ms. Minick demonstrates how Justia has begun to apply the AALL legal citation standard to U.S. state codes, and how the use of this standard has the potential to improve public access via the Web to the full text of U.S. state statutes.

This post will be of interest to the legal community, legal publishers, open government data advocates, and the free access to law community.