As a follow up to yesterday’s post about copyright issues with state codes, the data that I collected on print state versions can be found on this google drive spreadsheet.

I also went through all of the states’ citation rules, because I was curious about citation requirements to commercial vs. public domain works as well as requirements to use The Bluebook (a proprietary citation system) itself by states.  So that data is also in that spreadsheet.  My main takeaways from that are:

• 11 states require use of the Bluebook (in whole or part)
• 22 states specfically require citation to West National Reporter System cases (instead of using the cite you can find, for example, via Google Scholar.)
• 16 states use public domain citation formats, although many also require parallel cites to West NRS cases.  Of course, anything before the change over to Public Domain will require cite to a non-vendor or media neutral source.

I want to go back through the citation rule information and see how many states have their own citation manual, because it could be inferred that those that don’t are also Bluebook by default.  Although I did see instances of “any accepted citation format” as a guide, so in theory they could use Peter Martin’s free and open Basic Legal Citation.  I also want to get an exact count of how many of the Public Domain states really do require citation to commercial cites.  Sort of kicking myself that I didn’t think to keep track when I was doing it, although with only 16 states, it should be pretty easy to accomplish.