In late 1819 Greenleaf mentioned to Joseph Story his personal interest in compiling a list of cases in English and American reports indicating which cases had been cancelled, and wondered whether this would be useful to other members of the profession. Story encouraged him to turn his list into a post and gave him advice. In fact, Story had already thought about the need for a resource, as proposed by Greenleaf, and had gone so far as to propose it to Henry Wheaton, the journalist of the Supreme Court of the United States. Story explained to Greenleaf that the index should also be careful in indicating the extent to which a case was treated negatively, as some cases were not completely resolved but had doubts about them, or only parts of them were reversed or limited to specific cases. The index, he explained, should represent a whole spectrum of this type of treatment. (Ogden, p. 4) Greenleaf generally adopted this format and published the list as a set of cases that were cancelled, rejected, questioned or restricted in their application, from US and English reports. (Portland, 1821). The first edition of the book contained about 600 entries and included cases from existing English reports and printed American reports, as well as commentaries on certain treaties and other points on which Greenleaf cited the printed sources in which they appeared. He did not always note the precise moment when a case was treated negatively, a problem that an early critic noted (he omitted such treatment seven times on page 2 of the book) (A Collection, p.

71). Subsequent editions appeared in 1838, 1840, and 1856 and contained a greater number of citations, which numbered in the thousands in the third edition. Greenleaf said it had little to do with its publication. For computer scientists working with legal documents, the first and most difficult thing to understand is that U.S. legal citations are not unique document identifiers and cannot be used in this way. Instead, they are a kind of document address or a place where you can search where you could find a document. They are based on the volume and page number when a case is found in a series of printed books. Since more than one case can appear on a page – sometimes much more if the page is a tabular reference to many smaller cases – there is no guarantee of uniqueness. Citation (in law, this means the scope and page in the journalists or books in which decisions are published) Greenleaf`s reports were part of a trend that was taking place at the time – particularly in East Coast states – towards publishing state judicial reports in a serial format. While court reports in the United States were still in their infancy, the number of printed volumes of legal cases increased. In the first decades after independence, very few U.S.

courts registered court opinions. Traditionally, lawyers who hoped to stay informed of cases that were being dealt with negatively in their jurisdiction were required to record them privately in regular notebooks or books. (Surrency, pp. 24-25). Such notes made them less dependent on published sources than modern lawyers, but their access to information was much more limited (Surrency, p. 38). The first two printed reports published in America did not appear until 1789. (For the curious, these were Ephraim Kirby`s Connecticut reports and Francis Hopkinson`s judgments in the Pennsylvania Admiralty in four trials, but not necessarily in that order.) Over the next decade, a number of other printed reports followed, including four volumes, those of Alexander J.

Dallas, which were later included in the U.S. reports, which recount the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1810, there were only 18 volumes of reports published in America. (Ogden, 3). U.S. lawyers regularly cited English cases that appeared in collections of reports also published in England, a practice that came with a handful of challenges. (Kempin, pp.

31-32). But in the early 19th century, as more and more volumes of cases appeared, it became difficult to manage the grandeur of literature. The first compendium of American law did not appear until the 1820s, and there was no resource that held an up-to-date record of cases of treatment received from later courts. (Ogden, p. 3) It was by no means easy to determine whether a case discovered by a lawyer during the search still had a precedent. Quotations in parentheses and narrative quotations in the text are formatted as with any other source (first element of the reference list entry, year), although, unlike other sources, court decisions and cases use italics for the title in the citation in the text. For example (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954). You don`t need to create a citation for entire federal or state constitutions. Just refer to them by name in the text. When citing specific articles and edits, create reference list entries and in-text citations as usual. The U.S.

Constitution should be attached in reference lists and square brackets to U.S. Const. be abbreviated. Use legal abbreviations for state constitutions, such as In. Const. for the Constitution of Indiana. In the story, spell these place names: United States, United States, Indiana. Follow the numbering pattern of the Constitution (Roman for articles and amendments of the United States Constitution and for articles of the State Constitution, but Arabic for State Amendments).

Warren, Charles, 1868-1954. History of Harvard Law School and the First Legal Conditions in America, by Charles Warren.