Issue 87162

Appellate briefs need Tables of Authorities . For the non-lawyers out there, a 
ToA is a kind of sectioned bibliography for lawyers: it indexes all the 
various citations used in a document by type of authority (constitutions, 
statutes, regulations, case law, secondary authorities, etc.).
MS Word and WordPerfect have table-of-authority builders built right into the 
program.
Essentially, the ToA builder goes through the whole document, looking for 
anything that might look like it's a citation. Once it finds a possible 
citation, it stops: the user can then mark the citation and add it to an 
index. In the end, you end up with something that looks like this:
TABLE OF AUTHORITIES
BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 273 U.S. 177, 93 F.2d 14 
(1953)...................1, 2 
There, you see Brown, its full citation in Blue Book format, and the pages 
where it's cited.
Now, OpenOffice and LaTeX should be able to do a simple trick like this--and 
do it better. But they're structurally different programs. Instead of treating 
the document like one long stream of text, they use a "structured document" 
model.
Theoretically, the structured document should be better: you define the 
logical parts of your document and let the program deal with all the fiddly 
character-by-character design issues. To make this work, you need to have a 
separate bibliographic database, and then insert tagged references into the 
document as you go. Sounds good, right?
Wrong.
In OpenOffice, as in TeX, it's the bibliographic package (bibtex or some such) 
that generates the formatted citation. And, wouldn't you know it--there aren't 
any style files out there.