Shepard's Citations

Shepard's Citations is a citator used in United States legal research that provides a list of all the authorities citing a particular case, statute, or other legal authority. Shepardizing (sometimes written lower-case) is the process of consulting Shepard's to see if a case has been overturned, reaffirmed, questioned, or cited by later cases. Until the development of electronic citators like Westlaw's KeyCite during the 1990s, Shepard's was the only legal citation service that attempted to provide comprehensive coverage of U.S. law.

The name comes from a service begun by Frank Shepard (1848–1900) in 1873 which published citations in a series of books for different jurisdictions. Initially, the product was called Shepard's Adhesive Annotations. The citations were printed on gummed, perforated sheets, which could be divided and pasted onto pages of case law. Known as "stickers", these were literally torn to bits and stuck to pertinent margins of case reporters.

By the early 20th century, the Frank Shepard Company was binding the citations into maroon volumes with Shepard's Citations stamped in gold on their spines, much like the ones still found on library shelves.

Under William Guthrie Packard, the company continued to grow. It moved to Colorado Springs in 1948; in 1951, it adopted the name Shepard's Citations, Inc. In 1966, Shepard's Citations was acquired by McGraw Hill.

In 1996, Shepard's was purchased by Times Mirror and Reed Elsevier (owner of LexisNexis since 1994). In 1998, LexisNexis bought full ownership of Shepard's. After this acquisition, LexisNexis engaged in a "multi-million-dollar Citations Redesign (CR) project" that "redesigned the way we process case law and citations".

In March 1999, LexisNexis released an online version, named Shepard's Citation Service. While print versions of Shepard's remain in use, their use is declining. Although learning to Shepardize in print was once a rite of passage for all first-year law students, the Shepard's Citations booklets in hardcopy format are cryptic compared to the online version, because of the need to cram as much information about as many cases in as little space as possible.

Shepard's in paper format consists of long tables of citations (with full case titles omitted) preceded by one or two-letter codes indicating their relationship to the case being Shepardized. Before computer-assisted legal research became widely available, generations of lawyers (and law clerks and assistants) had to manually locate the Shepard's entry for a case, decipher all the cryptic abbreviations, then manually retrieve all the cases that were marked by Shepard's as criticizing or overruling a particular case, to determine whether the later cases had directly overruled that particular case on the specific holding of interest to one's client. In many jurisdictions in the U.S., it is still possible to cite a case as good law even though it has been overruled, as long as it was overruled on another holding and not the specific holding for which it is being cited.

Another flaw with the Shepard's paper format is that it was published in the form of hardcover books. These books were cumulative only through the date of publication, which posed the problem of how to add new citations after the original publication date. Like other law books, Shepard's was traditionally updated through the release of both hardcover and softcover supplement volumes. Thus, a researcher had to first consult the most recent cumulative set of Shepard's citators in their law library, then check supplements for additional citations.