Abandoning Law Reports for Official Digital Case Law

I. INTRODUCTION Like most states Arkansas entered the twentieth century with the responsibility for case law publication imposed by law on a public official lodged within the judicial branch. The "reporter's" office was then, as it is still today, a "constitutional" one. (1) Title and role reach all the way back to Arkansas's admission to the Union. Since the Arkansas Supreme Court's first term in 1837, a Reporter has collected and published the justices' important decisions in numbered volumes of the Arkansas Reports. By 1900 the series had reached volume 67. Representative of the era, that volume was prepared by T.D. Crawford, Reporter, printed by the Gazette Publishing Company of Little Rock, and copyrighted by the state's secretary of state. In addition to the text of judicial opinions, the book consists of a table of contents, a table of cited cases, several appendices, including one containing statements eulogizing a deceased member of the Arkansas bar, and lists of cases decided but not reported plus those the court disposed of orally. It concludes with an index. (2) Spanning legal topics from "abandonment" to "witnesses" and including all cited statutes, this editorial addition allowed a researcher to determine whether, for example, a particular volume included any cases addressing the liability of railroads for killing livestock and, upon finding that one did, turn directly to them. Accompanying each decision is an additional set of editorial enhancements, by 1900 more or less standard in case law reports. These include headnotes that summarize the court's holding or holdings with a direct reference to the pertinent portion of the opinion, a statement of the underlying facts and the ruling below, followed by summaries of the arguments made and authorities cited by counsel for the parties on appeal and their names. (3) Unlike most states Arkansas carried this publicly run system of case law dissemination into the twenty-first century. Over the years it had been altered in response to changes in judicial structure and practice, the expectations of lawyers and judges, and, significantly, the existence of commercial alternatives, first in print and then in electronic form. But volume 340 of the Arkansas Reports, published in 2000, is remarkably similar to its century-old predecessor. A few important features are different. First, Arkansas's practice of copyrighting the reports ended with volume 172, published in 1927. Second, when the state judicial system acquired an intermediate appellate court, the Reporter was assigned responsibility for publishing its decisions as well, although only those that court deemed important enough for publication. (4) Volume 340 of the Arkansas Reports, published in 2000, is, as a consequence, bound together with volume 69 of the Arkansas Appellate Reports. It was printed by an out-of-state rather than a local firm. (5) For the most part, however, the state's law report volumes of recent vintage contain the same core elements as their counterparts of a century or more before--decision texts compiled and edited by a Reporter, accompanied by research aids including tables, indices, and headnotes, prepared by the same judicial official. (6) In 2009 that continuity came to an end. After over 170 years, Arkansas ceased publication of print law reports. Volume 375 of the Arkansas Reports, bound together with volume 104 of the Arkansas Appellate Reports, is the last that will appear. Arkansas's Reporter continues to be responsible for putting out an official report of the state's appellate decisions. Indeed, that responsibility has been expanded to encompass much larger numbers of them. What has changed, and changed radically, is the means. For all decisions handed down after February 12, 2009, not books but a database of electronic documents "created, authenticated, secured, and maintained by the Reporter of Decisions" constitutes the "official report." (7) With justifiable pride, the state supreme court proclaimed Arkansas to be the first jurisdiction in the nation to switch from law report publication to official legal data distribution. …