Legal Definitions - star paging

Star paging is a system used primarily in legal publishing to maintain consistent page references across different editions or formats of a document. It serves two main purposes:

• First, it allows readers to locate specific content in an earlier, often authoritative, printed edition of a text even when they are using a newer print edition. This is achieved by embedding the original page numbers directly into the text of the later edition.
• Second, by extension, it refers to the method of displaying the original page breaks from printed legal documents (like court opinions or law review articles) within their digital versions on computer screens. This ensures that citations to digital texts can accurately reflect the pagination of the corresponding printed source.

Here are some examples to illustrate star paging:

• Imagine a lawyer writing a legal brief who needs to cite a specific passage from a Supreme Court case. The lawyer is using a modern, updated print edition of the official Supreme Court Reporter. However, standard legal citation rules require referencing the page numbers from the *original* printed edition of that case. Star paging in the newer edition would show markers like *p. 45* or [45] within the text, indicating where page 45 of the original, older edition began. This allows the lawyer to accurately cite the original page number, ensuring that anyone looking up the case, regardless of which edition they possess, can find the exact cited text.

• Consider a law student researching a topic using an online legal research database. They find a highly relevant article published in a prominent law review. While reading the article on their computer screen, they notice numbers like *p. 123* appearing periodically within the digital text. These numbers represent the original page breaks from the physical, printed version of the law review journal. This feature, star paging, allows the student to accurately cite the article using the page numbers from the print edition, which is crucial for academic papers and legal documents that often require citations to the original print pagination.

• A judge is reviewing a legal memorandum submitted by an attorney. The memorandum cites a specific sentence from a federal appellate court opinion. The judge accesses the opinion through an electronic legal database. The database uses star paging to embed the original page numbers from the official printed Federal Reporter within the digital text. So, even though the judge is viewing the opinion on a screen, they can see exactly where the cited sentence appeared on page 789 of the printed reporter (e.g., *p. 789*), confirming the accuracy of the attorney's citation and easily locating the referenced material in its original context.