legal research 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 probl ...

, a citator is a

citation index A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebr ...

of legal resources, one of the best-known of which in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

Shepard's Citations ''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. The verb ''Shepardizing'' (sometimes written lower-case) refers to ...

. 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. Using a citator in this way is

colloquially Colloquialism (), also called colloquial language, everyday language or general parlance, is the style (sociolinguistics), linguistic style used for casual (informal) communication. It is the most common functional style of speech, the idiom norm ...

referred to as "Shepardizing".

Use in legal research

Topical research

Because cases cite related cases, citators can be used to find cases which are on topics related to a given topic. A common research strategy is to use "one good case" to find related cases.

Establishing authority

Another important application is to determine whether the conclusions of one case have been followed, overturned, or modified in later cases, especially by higher courts. This is important for legal systems in which the binding authority of a case is contingent on

precedent A precedent is a principle or rule established in a previous legal case that is either binding on or persuasive for a court or other tribunal when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts. Common-law legal systems place great valu ...

. Citators often include annotations indicating the history and treatment of a case in citing opinions. Shepard's notes 'history' as affirmed, modified, reversed, same case, Superseded, or vacated; and 'treatment' as criticised, distinguished, explained, j dissenting opinion, ~ consenting opinion, Limited, overruled, or questioned. Although originally distributed only as printed and bound volumes, citators are now typically on-line services such as

LexisNexis LexisNexis is a part of the RELX corporation that sells data analytics products and various databases that are accessed through online portals, including portals for computer-assisted legal research (CALR), newspaper search, and consumer informa ...

's online ''Shepard's Citations'', Justis Publishing's provider-neutral

JustCite 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. JustCite has a legal search engine, with built-in citation index functi ...

Westlaw 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 statute ...

's KeyCite,

Bloomberg Law Bloomberg Law is a subscription-based service that uses data analytics and artificial intelligence for online legal research. The service, which Bloomberg L.P. introduced in 2009, provides legal content, proprietary company information and news ...

's BCite, and the Oxford Law Citator of

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...

History

Citation indexes to the Bible date to the 13th century.see

Citation index A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebr ...

article. In English legal literature, volumes of judicial reports included lists of cases cited in that volume starting with ''Raymond's Reports'' (1743) and followed by ''Douglas's Reports'' (1783). Simon Greenleaf (1821) published an alphabetical list of cases with notes on later decisions affecting the precedential authority of the original decision. The first true citation index dates to the 1860 publication of Labatt's ''Table of Cases...California...'', followed in 1872 by Wait's ''Table of Cases...New York...''. But the most important and best-known citation index came with the 1873 publication of

.Fred R. Shapiro, "Origins of Bibliometrics, Citation Indexing, and Citation Analysis: The Neglected Legal Literature" ''Journal of the American Society of Information Science'' 43:5:337-339 (1992) Frank Shepard Company started publishing citators in New York City in 1873 and other companies provided similar services at around the same time, ''e.g.'' George Fred Williams's ''Massachusetts citations: a table of cases, overruled, denied, doubted, criticised, approved, and cited by the Supreme Judicial Court'' (Boston, 1878). The name 'citator' appears to have been coined by the Citator Publishing Company (Detroit) in 1908 in ''The Citator: an annotated compilation of citations of the

Kansas Supreme Court The Kansas Supreme Court is the highest judicial authority in the state of Kansas. Composed of seven justices, led by Chief Justice Marla Luckert, the court supervises the legal profession, administers the judicial branch, and serves as the st ...

...''.

Notes

External links