Articles Tagged with Citators

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Cite checking goes by many names, including Shepardizing, KeyCite, and authority checking, among others. At a basic level it is checking a case one plans to use to make sure it’s still okay. Rulings from cases can become invalid over time if a more recent case from the same or a higher court changes the rule, or if the legislature passed a statute that impacted the case. In order to find such events, legal publishers have created tools (called citators) to track such changes.

One of the original tools was Shepard’s (now a LexisNexis product). The online LexisNexis version allows a user to find documents that cite the case they are looking at. It also allows a user to see if any of those have overturned the case of interest, or otherwise challenged part of its ruling. In Shepard’s there are visual indicators to suggest a case is still good (green), called into question (yellow), or part of it has been overturned (red). Westlaw has a similar tool called KeyCite, and Fastcase uses Authority Check.

It is important to note that any of these tools can only indicate that there might be something. The user will have to read the newer case that may affect the original case to see what that impact actually is, and how it relates to the user’s situation.

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Golden Rule of Legal Writing: Never, ever cite to anything you haven’t read carefully.

There is a reason law librarians try to drill that rule into the heads of lawyers and law students (and journalists):

“Is it a “Good” Case? Can You Rely on BCite, KeyCite, and Shepard’s to Tell You?,” by Kristina Niedringhaus, JOTWELL (April 22, 2019) (reviewing Paul Hellyer, Evaluating Shepard’s, KeyCite, and BCite for Case Validation Accuracy, 110 Law Libr. J. 449 (2018)).

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I recently asked law librarians for alternate, non-proprietary, ways of saying “Shepard’s” or “KeyCite” (or Shepardizing or KeyCiting). Below you’ll find a short list and a long list of responses, and not a few “namemushs.”

We focused primarily on case citators, but keep in mind you can cite-check a lot of things, including law review articles, court rules, statutes, and regulations (to name only 4).

What’s a citator? We like this concise description of Online Citators, from the University of Washington Law School librarians.

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“.... The newly launched WeCite Project, co-sponsored by the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics and the free legal research platform Casetext, aims to bring the win-win power of crowdsourcing to the task….” [Link to the full Legal Research Plus blog post.]

What might Frank Shepard (the Shepard of Shepardizing) think?

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