Source: http://citeblog.access-to-law.com/?m=201311
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 15:52:37+00:00

Document:
Until electronic publications of case reports become generally available to and commonly relied upon by courts and lawyers in the jurisdiction [adopting neutral citation], the court should strongly encourage parallel citations, in addition to the [neutral] primary citation …, to commonly used printed case reports.
Most states adopting some form of print-independent citation during this period went beyond “strongly encourage” and required parallel citation to the National Reporter System. A few states also required citation to a continuing set of official print reports. Some neutral citation adopters like North Dakota, but not all (see below), realized that since paragraph numbers attached to decisions by the deciding court traveled with it into print requiring a parallel pinpoint page served no purpose (being both redundant and less precise).
Present conditions compel those maintaining legal databases to index cases by alternative citation systems where they exist. Consider, as an example, the decision of the Kansas Supreme Court in Kansas Dept. of Revenue v. Powell filed on June 4, 2010. In time that case acquired volume and page numbers, first in the Pacific Reporter (232 P.3d 856) and later in the state-published Kansas Reports (290 Kan. 564). Either cite will retrieve the decision on: Westlaw, Lexis, Bloomberg Law, Casemaker, Fastcase, Loislaw, or Google Scholar. The first four of those services (including Casemaker, the one available without additional charge to all members of the Kansas Bar Association) have also inserted dual sets of page break notations in that and all other Kansas case files. As a consequence their users can make or follow pinpoint citations employing either the official report or regional reporter’s system. They don’t need both.
Decisions from jurisdictions that have implemented neutral citation schemes employing paragraph numbers arrive embedded with complete citation information. They and their key passages can be retrieved from a full spectrum of legal research services and even the open Web without resort to parallel National Reporter System volume and page numbers. In releasing lawyers from the obligation to furnish parallel citations Colorado and Illinois have simplified case citation without inflicting inconvenience on users of any of the competing legal research services.
States that adopted neutral citation systems a decade or more ago but failed to make a complete break from print-derived citations (see below) should follow the lead of these two recent adopters. Any value parallel citation once had as a transition measure vanished along with printed law reports.
Arkansas does not use paragraph numbers.
Use of the neutral citation is optional, but if one does use it a parallel print citation is not necessary.
Louisiana does not use paragraph numbers.
Print publication of the New Mexico Reports ceased with volume 150. All published decisions have been given neutral citations, retrospectively.
Source: Basic Legal Citation § 7-500.
Serious discussion is underway among members of OASIS Open around the need for a new Technical Committee that would be charged with developing a free, open markup standard for legal citations. John Joergensen of Rutgers-Newark has summarized the proposal and its rationale. Robin Cover of OASIS has prepared a useful background document.
Artfully, the argument conflated two quite distinct goals for a citation system – one central, the other secondary and often sacrificed to competing values. As explained in § 1-200 of Basic Legal Citation: a functional legal citation must, within limited space, “provide the reader with sufficient information to find the document or document part in the sources the reader has available (which may or may not be the same sources as those used by the writer).” A second and separate principle would call for disclosure of the writer’s actual source. In a much cited 1982 article on citation theory and practice, Paul Axel-Lute placed the latter citation principle dead last in his list of thirteen, a set which he noted carried inevitable conflicts.
As the Axel-Lute article observed this “writer disclose your source” principle is, in numerous settings, trumped by the principle of “brevity” and also overridden by rules calling for citation to “official” sources (whether or not in fact used by the writer). Noting that longstanding practice, codified in The Bluebook, which had just then appeared in its thirteenth edition, did not require specification of source in citations of court rules, Axel-Lute surmised this was because they “are found in a multiplicity of sources.” He observed that the same held for citations to the Constitution.
In the early 1980s case law was not available from a “multiplicity of sources” and a case citation in the format “___ F.2d ___, ___” at once directed readers to the cited passage and indicated the writer’s use of a specific source. Four decades later “multiplicity of sources” characterizes access to nearly all types of primary legal materials in the U.S., and such a citation cannot reasonably be understood as representing that the writer has read the decision in the pages of a particular printed volume or even in the digital replica sold online by the same publisher. Today, with few exceptions, cases and statutes are available from “a multiplicity of sources,” some free to all, others free to all members of a state bar, and still others wrapped in costly layers of added value. So long as a citation to a judicial opinion or statutory section enables a reader to retrieve the document from her preferred source there is no more need for the writer to declare his source than with a constitution provision or court rule.
Consider also the statutory provision at issue in J.C. v. J.B. It is cited by the court as “Ind. Code § 31-17-5-1.” On Lexis that section is presented as “Burns Ind. Code Ann. § 31-17-5-1.” Westlaw identifies the same provision as part of “West’s Annotated Indiana Code.” Both titles match those of copyrighted print compilations marketed by the respective companies. Were one to take the “writer disclose your source” principle seriously even a citation to “Burns Ind. Code Ann.” would have to indicate whether it referred to the publisher’s print or electronic version. Somewhat ambiguously The Bluebook instructs a writer to cite to “Indiana Code … if therein” rather than to either commercial version, but does it mean a specific “Indiana Code”? Although the Indiana Legislative Services Agency maintains an up-to-date compilation of the state’s statutes with that title at: http://www.in.gov/legislative/ic/2010/, it is good bet that the Indiana lawyer who complies with the state’s rules of appellate procedure and cites to Ind. Code § 31-17-5-1 has secured its text from Lexis, Westlaw, or Casemaker rather than from that public site.
During the print era it was, in many settings, important for a statutory citation to indicate the specific source relied on by the writer, but today “Ind. Code” and the equivalent in other states are generic references. They are identifiers that enable retrieval of the relied upon text from a multiplicity of sources rather than a signal that the writer has consulted a particular one. The major citation manuals and some state rules are not clear on this point, largely because they remain stuck in patterns shaped by print.
There are still some situations where the “writer disclose your source” principle merges with the core task of facilitating the reader’s retrieval of the cited text, where indicating source avoids the risk of a “nowhere citation” or misdirection. In the present environment, however, generic citations of cases and statutes are the norm. Traditional formats that imply reliance upon a particular source too often consume unnecessary space, impose costs and delay, and run some risk of confusion.

References: v. 
 § 7
 § 1
 v. 
 § 31
 § 31
 § 31