Introduction to the Medium Neutral Citation

This section introduces the editor the Medium Neutral Citation (MNC) standard and paragraph numbering.

The legal profession relies on authority (case-law and legislation) and persuasive secondary legal literature (scholarly works, preparatory works, dictionaries, etc.) to build and present legal arguments. The core purpose of case law citation is to accurately identify a judicial opinion or a part thereof – traditionally, its location in a printed law report series.

In traditional law reporting, case citations do not reflect information about the case itself, but rather identify the year, volume and page number of the law report(s) that contains the judicial opinion. References to specific parts of a judicial opinion (pinpoint referencing) are also in general based on the page number and the paragraph letter.

The digitization of the judicial opinions allows courts to make judgments available immediately through the Internet or other media, in comparison to commercial publishers who take between a month and sometimes years to publish a judgment in the law reports. While obviously impacting the greater accessibility of judicial opinions, the legal profession and the media still need a reliable method for referencing such electronic decisions. Substitutes for the commercial publishers assigned citations and for page numbers must accompany such judgments.

A survey of international practices in this regard shows that courts have taken steps to address these issues by introducing Medium Neutral Citations and Paragraph Numbering within the final versions of judgments.

The Medium Neutral Citation (MNC) allows a resource such as a judgment to be cited irrespective of its publishing medium, namely, in print form or in electronic form, regardless of whether they have been, or will be published in any printed law reports series. The MNC serves as a permanent unique identifier assigned by the author of the judgment and should remain associated with the judgment wherever it is published in various media or publications.

The MNC enhances the discoverability of judgments across publications, such as commercial law reports series, LII and other websites.

The MNC includes a global identifier of the issuing court, made up of the ISO-3166-1 standard two-letter country code and an abbreviation of the tribunal’s name. This is GH for Ghana, TZ for Tanzania, CI for Côte d'Ivoire.

The MNC should be assigned by the court to the final version (filing and distribution version) of judgments. If the Judiciary does not assign MNCs, the LIIs will automatically assign an MNC based on the order in which the judgment is uploaded on the system, the issuing court, and the year of the judgment.