This is the fourth in a series of blog postings on the American Society for Indexing’s (ASI) Virtual Conference, held on Saturday, May 2nd. The Annual Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina was postponed until 2021 because of COVID-19.
Held on Zoom, the fourth session, Tables of Cases, presented by Bonnie Taylor, gave an overview of the rules for legal indexing of cases. She began by describing a table of cases, which is an alphabetized list of the judicial decisions cited in a work, a type of bibliography for legal cases. Other tables include those for statutes, regulations, constitutions, and court rules.
Case citations follow rules, which can be found in the legal Bluebook, available in print or as an online subscription from https://www.legalbluebook.com.
She broke down a citation into its parts, explaining what each meant and how it was written. Every case mentioned in the text is included in the table, by specific citation. A citation includes the name (Party v. Party), the volume of the report in which it’s found, the series name, the page number, and the date.
Reversals are flipped citations that put the leading information first with a cross-reference. For example, use the cross-reference “United States v. See name of opposing party,” and use “Doe, United States v.” as the actual entry in the table of cases.
This presentation served as an excellent introduction into legal indexing and tables of cases.
I will discuss the fifth session of the Virtual Conference in the next blog posting. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com
Tags: American Society for Indexing, legal indexing, tables of cases, Virtual Conference