MARCH 2000
How (to Cite) to [Electronic] Sources (2000.)
As lawyers, judges, and law students increasingly rely upon the Web for information, it may surprise you that there is no universally accepted format for citations taken from electronic sources. Traditional methods of citing only apply to court rulings that appear on court, law school, and other legal Web pages. These citations sometimes take months before appearing in official reporters.
In 1995, the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) recommended that all courts, as they release opinions, issue their own medium-neutral citation based on the following formula: case name, year, court, and sequential opinion number for that year. Paragraph numbers would serve as pinpoint citations (e.g., Melendez v. Farber, 1999 U.S. App. (9th) 21, ¦ 17). Eleven states are now using all or part of the new citations and at least another ten are considering court-issued citations. Until format-neutral Internet citations are universally accepted, peruse the following sources for procedures on citing to legal and other online information.
For legal materials:
For nonlegal electronic source materials:
The sources below give you exact instructions for citing to online resources. Author or editor (year in parenthesis), title, edition or source (the latter in italics), [type of medium in brackets], available protocol, the URL, and finally the [access date in brackets].
Also, try visiting the ABA Uniform Citation Standards
(www.abanet.org/citation/home.html) that not only has its own in-depth medium-neutral proposal but also has a link to the states already employing similar methods.
Excerpted from "Citing to Internet Sources" by James Evans, California Lawyer, June 1999.
 
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