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Peter W. Martin
Peter W. Martin

Peter W. Martin is the Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Cornell University and a former dean of Cornell Law School (1980-1988). For three decades he has been engaged in projects probing the impact of digital technology on the functioning of law and legal institutions. He created the first electronic reference work in law to integrate treatise material and all pertinent primary law (Martin on Social Security) which debuted on Lexis in 1991, was published on CD-ROM by Clark Boardman Callaghan from 1994-1999, and has since moved to the Web. He co-founded Cornell's Legal Information Institute (LII) with Thomas R. Bruce in 1992, the first Internet law resource and still the most heavily used non-profit legal Web site. In addition to serving as the LII's co-director for over a decade and continuing to maintain his Social Security reference, Professor Martin has prepared and regularly updated a Web resource, ebook, and accompanying online tutorials on legal citation (Introduction to Basic Legal Citation). He also blogs on citation issues at Citing Legally, and is the author of numerous articles on uses of digital technology in law and legal education. The most recent are available on SSRN. Between 1996 and 2007 he offered law courses that employed electronic materials of his design and preparation to hundreds of students at over a dozen U.S. law schools via the Internet.

Martin is a graduate of Cornell University and Harvard Law School. Before joining the Cornell faculty in 1972 he taught at the University of Minnesota.

Columns by Peter W. Martin
Permalink to Citation as DNACitation as DNA
Citation as DNA

Justia guest columnist, Cornell law professor emeritus, and former dean of Cornell Law School Peter W. Martin explores how citation format can be used to expose the true parentage of a case law collection, such as that of Westlaw, LexisNexis, Bloomberg Law, and other case law database services. Martin describes his methodology and calls attention to the existence of differences among the major database services. He questions whether these differences even matter to a majority of practitioners, judges, and librarians but cautions that for the sake of authenticity and reliability, they perhaps should matter.