Strong Democracies Need Reliable Citations

Legal systems must hold the trust of citizens in order for democracies to survive. Unfortunately, the American legal system is suffering from an unprecedented credibility crisis. Analyses of the roots of this problem have largely focused on political causes, with blame going to an array of issues ranging from the partisan nature of the judicial appointment process to the lack of ethical oversight for judges with lifetime appointments to the bench. Thus far, scholarly articles analyzing the modern erosion of precedent have generally examined precedent from political or subject-matter-specific perspectives. This Article takes a more universal approach by discussing the decline in the reliability of American legal precedent and the parallel degradation of judicial credibility from a procedural and practical perspective. Lost in the political fray is a more fundamental issue: citizens must continue to trust judges to follow the law for stable democracies to continue to survive and thrive. Judges communicate the reasons for their decisions, and the roots of those reasons, through a professional language known as citations. This Article examines the intersection of judicial integrity and governmental stability through the lens of citations—those tiny but mighty pathways to precedent, and the building blocks of judicial reasoning. Due to seismic shifts in how legal information is accessed, cited, and communicated, citations to legal precedent are becoming afterthoughts instead of building blocks, and the profession is seeing a breakdown of citation reliability as a result. This Article explains some of the practical causes contributing to the erosion of reliability in citations, including the lack of equitable access to legal information, the fetishization of format over function in citations, and the endorsement of quotation alterations. This Article also posits that a return to reliable citation norms would contribute to larger efforts to stabilize precedent and restore trust in the American legal system, which would reinforce the stabilization of our democracy. For democracies to be strong, their citizens must have faith in their public institutions; and for the American court system to be trusted, the reliability in citations must be restored.