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I got a note from Peter Martin, the Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law, Emeritus, and former dean, Cornell Law School, letting me know that he was starting a blog as a result of the work he was doing with the annual revision of Introduction to Basic Legal Citation. Peter, along with Tom Bruce, founded Cornell’s Legal Information Institute (LII) way back in 1992, and has been a staunch advocate of access to legal information, as well as promoting the consistency, accuracy, and non-vendor bias of legal citation.
Peter Martin’s new blog, Citing Legally, begins with a post on how States have claimed copyright on their codified and published works, and walks the reader through an example of how the State of Mississippi has used copyright claims to allow a private legal publisher to control the “official” statutes while attempting to shut out another publisher using “unofficial” compilations.
According to the Scope and Purpose of Citing Legally, the blog will cover the interesting issues that Peter Martin has uncovered while working on the annual revision. In his own words:
The aim will be to draw attention to important differences in practice among jurisdictions and distinctive approaches – from the commendable to the lamentable, the new and novel to the archaic. Like the reference from which it springs the focus here will be on how judges and lawyers cite legal authority rather than law journal norms.
I’m looking forward to reading more from Peter Martin on the issues he finds on legal citation and all the nuances and peculiarities that come along with the topic. Go check out Citing Legally and follow along with me.