AALL promotes free and effective access to legal information, and was one of the first organizations to publicly support medium-neutral citation. A. Access to Electronic Law. The fact that nowadays decisions are disseminated in both print and electronic form is a compelling reason to change citation form away from a print-dependent form. Virtually all judicial decisions are now written and issued in electronic form originally, using word processing software.
Page numbers are artificial conventions.
If the size of the print or the margins changes, the paging changes. Whereas opinions were formerly published in final form in one or two print reporters, with fixed volume and page numbers, today's decisions remain in electronic form, resident in electronic databases, making volume and page numbers unnecessary if a better citation system can be devised. In that system, each decision is permanently numbered at the time of release, eliminating the need for a volume and initial page number, and each paragraph of the decision is numbered at the time of publication. The paragraph number is part of the text of the decision. Consequently, there is one universal citation, good from the beginning, no matter what medium is used or which publisher distributes the opinion.