I first learned about public domain citations after law school, when I was working on a fifty-state survey. I was completely used to parentheticals that included the deciding court and the year of decision, so I couldn’t understand the examples I found from certain states. I thought that surely something was missing from these citations!

The example below, taken from The Bluebook, is for a 1999 case from the Supreme Court of Oklahoma.

Herbert v. Okla. Christian Coal., 1999 OK 90, 992 P.2d 322.

Herbert v. Okla. Christian Coal., 1999 OK 90, ¶ 2, 992 P.2d 322, 325.1

Where on earth is the concluding parenthetical that says, “(Okla. 1999)”?

It took me a little while to understand there was nothing missing. A public domain citation includes the information you need to identify the jurisdiction and date of a case. The year is at the beginning, and the jurisdiction is in the middle. The third element of the citation is the chronological number of the cases decided by that court in that year. This is analogous to a docket number, or an unreported case in Westlaw or Lexis. A parallel citation to the West reporter is included at the end, if it is available. Cases using a public domain system are issued with numbered paragraphs instead of page numbers, so they could be printed in any format without loss of information.2

The Bluebook, for the most part, does not care what a state’s internal citation rules are. But public domain citations are a major exception to that rule. If a state’s court rules have created a public domain citation system, then writers are required to use it when they cite a case from that state. Writers are also required to follow the state’s specific citation practices if they differ from The Bluebook’s standard public domain format. As of now, seventeen states use public domain citations for at least some of their cases.3

A movement toward creating public domain citations for cases began in the 1990s, with the growing popularity of the Internet and electronic legal research.4 However, citations to print case reporters remain the rule, and are typically required in addition to a public domain citation.

A case has a public domain citation from the moment it is issued, so the citation can be used immediately, without waiting for a print reporter to set the volume and page numbers. However, most appellate cases with public domain citations are likely to be published in the West reporters, so that advantage disappears quickly. In addition, depending on the state’s rules, a pinpoint citation to a specific paragraph may require an analogous pinpoint citation to the West page number. This means that printed reporters continue to be indispensable. Fortunately, the print citations can typically be located with the same amount of ease as the public domain citations, even if the reader does not have access to the printed volumes.

Students need to learn public domain citation systems if they practice in the states where they are used, or if they need to cite a relevant case from another state. Ultimately, the main effect of public domain citations is to add yet another rule to The Bluebook’s system of rules. At this point, instead of streamlining case citations, public domain systems make them more complicated. Luckily, law librarians are available to help students interpret case citations when they are confused about them. Understanding public domain citations adds one more wrinkle to a law librarian’s job.

  1. The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation 279 tbl.T.1.3 (Columbia L. Rev. Ass’n et al. eds., 21st ed. 2020). ↩︎
  2. Id. R. 10.3.3, at 104-05. ↩︎
  3. Id. at 242-94 tbl.T.1.3. ↩︎
  4. Jamie Pamela Rasmussen, Horseless Carriages with Buggy-Whip Holders: The Failure of Legal Citation Reform in the 1990s, 110 Law Libr. J. 221 (2018). ↩︎