It is customary for the General Reports prepared for the International Congresses of Comparative Law to compare and contrast different national legal systems, the details of which are presented in the various national reports. This General Report will not follow this custom, for the simple reason that a number of the national reports are already comparative examinations of methods of citation that contain such an abundance of references to legal writings and practices that no further examination is necessary.

The writing of a National Report in preparation for the World Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law involves a paradox. Contrary to what might legitimately be expected, a National Reporter is not asked to engage in any comparative analysis whatsoever. What, then, is the point of a National Report? The answer lies in what an elementary exegetical analysis would suggest: the National Reporter must present the national law on a given topic (or, more accurately, his perception of the national law, for we all know that there is no such thing as the national law). Traditionally, the boundaries of the reporting enterprise have remained confined within these parameters. It is thus left to a General Reporter appointed by the International Academy itself to make sense of the various National Reports on a given topic by bringing them together with a view to eliciting differences and similarities between the legal systems under consideration.

The question, whether and to what extent the citation of laws, Rechtsprechung and legal doctrine should be internationally standardized, cannot be answered for all branches of law without making certain distinctions. International contracts or codifications with multinational validity (for example, the law of the European Union) have other criteria to fulfill with regard to their function and coordination as does, for instance, the law of criminal procedure of a Swiss canton. The Rechtsprechung of a national supreme court has, as a result of the possibilities of international reception within the scope of comparative law, a different meaning from that of lower authorities. A scholarly paper with an international or comparative law perspective is not oriented toward the same target group nor with the same pretenses as a more practice oriented essay about procedural niceties of a specific national law. Moreover, it appears to me, the “whether” and “how” of an international standardization of the legal citation passes over the true problem. A formal standardization of the legal citation is not the important issue; rather, it is an increase in the mutual understandability of legal materials. Legal citations should be able to be understood as precisely and quickly as possible.

The use of abbreviations saves considerable time and space. This translates into savings in costs. However, one unfamiliar with abbreviations will lose considerable time in searching for their meanings.

Several proposals have been introduced in the United States to create new “public domain” or “vendor-neutral” approaches for citing judicial opinions.’ Differing systems for public domain citations have been adopted in the states of Colorado and Louisiana. At this writing, the judiciary in the state of Wisconsin is considering a third approach, one that would radically change the way lawyers and judges cite state cases in that jurisdiction.