In legal research

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 problem and concludes with the application and...

, a citator is a citation index

Citation index

A citation index is a kind of bibliographic database, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. The first citation indices were legal citators such as Shepard's Citations...

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

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 is Shepard's Citations

Shepard's Citations

In legal research, Shepard's Citations is a citator, a list of all the authorities citing a particular case, statute, or other legal authority. The verb Shepardizing refers to the process of consulting Shepard's to see if a case has been overturned, reaffirmed, questioned, or cited by later cases...

. 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 referred to as "Shepardizing".

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

Precedent

In common law legal systems, a precedent or authority is a principle or rule established in a legal case that a court or other judicial body may apply when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts...

.

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 Shepard's notes 'history' as affirmed, modified, reversed, same case, Superseded, or vacated; and 'treatment' as criticised, distinguished, explained, j dissenting opinion, ~ consenting opinion, Limited, overruled, or questioned.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

LexisNexis Group is a company providing computer-assisted legal research services. In 2006 it had the world's largest electronic database for legal and public-records related information...

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

JustCite

JustCite is a web-based legal search engine and citator from Justis Publishing Ltd. Focusing on case law and legislation, it is a provider-neutral service that links to content from a range of publishers and includes extensive links to full-text material from online services such as BAILII,...

, Westlaw

Westlaw

Westlaw is one of the primary online legal research services for lawyers and legal professionals in the United States and is a part of West. In addition, it provides proprietary database services...

's KeyCite and the Oxford Law Citator of Oxford University Press

Oxford University Press

Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...

.

History

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

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is the highest court in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The SJC has the distinction of being the oldest continuously functioning appellate court in the Western Hemisphere.-History:...

(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

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 Lawton Nuss, the Court supervises the legal profession, administers over the judicial branch, and serves as the state court of last resort in the appeals...

....

Further reading

• "Mastering The Lawless Science Of Our Law: A Story Of Legal Citation Indexes." Patti Ogden, Law Library Journal Winter 1993 (85 Law Libr. J. 1)
• Origins of bibliometrics, citation indexing, and citation analysis: The neglected legal literature. Fred R. Shapiro.

External links

• How to Shepardize from LexisNexis.