The +Cite Project

The +Cite project is an ongoing effort to develop a useful collection of hypertext legal citation resources for American case law. In legal research and writing, a +Cite (“plus-cite”) consists of (1) a public domain or other standardized plain text citation; and (2) an unobtrusive, standardized hypertext link to a free online version of the cited material.

The first +Cites were released in May and June, 2015, in the +OSCN citation files, which organized case law from the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals and Oklahoma Supreme Court. These cites joined the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network public domain citation format with a short hyperlink to the cited case with the notation, +OSCN, e.g., Roper v. United States, 1908 OK CR 1 +OSCN ; Allison v. Berger, 1890 OK 1 +OSCN.

The +Cite concept unites traditional legal citation with the power of hypertext and the rapidly expanding access to free American case law collections on the world wide web. +Cites are easily inserted from HTML source files into standard word processing with copy/paste operations.

+Cites are particularly suited to e-filed legal documents in portable document format (PDF). The principal advantages of the +Cite concept are ease and low cost of citation delivery (no proprietary or pay-for-service legal databases are used, the +Cite source files are freely available under the Creatives Commons Share-Alike Attribution 3.0 license); shorter and more informative citations; and providing the reader with single-click access to a trusted online version of the cited authority.

The current sources for case law in +Cite development are the OSCN for Oklahoma case law and the Google Scholar collection of federal case law from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals and US Supreme Court. Other public domain state portals may be suitable for expansion of the +Cite collection.

The short-term goals of the project include future development of a simple web browser plug-in automating user access to +Cite citation upon loading a covered case law resource.