In this post, May It Please The Court brings up many good points about citing unpublished opinions. Unpublished opinions do not have the same precedential value as published opinions, obviously, but they continue to be cited and relied upon.
When blogs begin to get cited - as they inevitably will - for persuasive authority in a specialized area of law or simple guidance to a new or unknown area (much as treatises or scholarly articles are cited now) will they be considered of lesser value than "published" materials?
Are there any shared ideas/lessons or parallels here? Or is it a stretch to even try to connect the two?
Posted by david on November 28, 2003 09:24 AMi) The more precisely you quote the blog, the more detailed/precise your attribution should be.
ii) As the need to verify the attribution rises, the more detailed/precise your attribution should be.
Note: because many blogs and online pages are transitory (they may be available on the Web for a short period of time), it may be wise to include a printed screen shot of the blog entry as an appendix, or cite to a semi-permanent online archive URL of the blog, such as archive.org.
Determining which type of blog attribution to use depends on: 1) the context; and 2) medium that you're using.
Context can range from informal to formal, silly to serious. Additionally, determining the correct method of attribution depends what you want to credit: an idea, a comment to an entry, or an exact passage.
The medium factor is farily open ended. Print publication, online publication, judicial brief, academic paper, business research, and blog are just some of the available media where attributing a blog may be necessary.
A few examples:
a) an required academic research paper for a law school course would probably use a formalized citation attribution to a quoted blog;
b) a blog posting about another blog discussion would probably use an informal link and/or mention of the blog's title;
c) a legal brief submitted to the court would definitely use formal citation.
There are lots of ways to credit a blog or online posting. Attribution ranges from an informal mention to a formal citation.
Some of the means of attribution:
Hypertext link to the page;
A mention of the URL (non-clickable);
A mention of the blog's title, author, date and/or entry heading;
A formal citation that includes blog title, author, date, entry heading, and URL;
A screen shot of the blog page and/or its source code.
There's no question that lawyers, judges, journalists, students and researchers will at some point need to cite a blog or other online information. Given the formal nature of legal citation, it is important to create some standard ways that this can be done.
Posted by AZ on November 25, 2003 11:19 AM