Legal Writing Help

When a user creates a Perma.cc link, Perma.cc archives the referenced content and generates a link to an archived record of the page. Regardless of what may happen to the original source, the archived record will always be available through the Perma.cc link. Perma.cc is developed and maintained by the Harvard Law School Library in conjunction with university law libraries across the country and other organizations in the “forever” business.

Any author can go to the Perma.cc website and input a URL. Perma.cc downloads the material at that URL and gives back a new URL (a “Perma.cc link”) that can then be inserted in a paper.

Readers who encounter Perma.cc links can click on them like ordinary URLs. This takes them to the Perma.cc site where they are presented with a page that has links both to the original web source (along with some information, including the date of the Perma.cc link’s creation) and to the archived version stored by Perma.cc.

To preserve web pages with Perma.cc, you need an account. Anyone can create an account, and each account lets you preserve up to 10 records per month for free.

Perma.cc also offers unlimited free accounts to academic journals and faculty members affiliated with any registrar library (courts and other government organizations also can qualify for unlimited free accounts). We are a registrar library. Let us know that you have a perma cc account and we can assign you to us as an archiving organization so that you can preserve more than 10 records per month.

To preserve a web page, login to your account, enter the URL of the page you want to preserve and click the "Create Perma Link" button, or try one of the Browser Tools. Perma will visit the web page at your direction and create a record of the contents of that page. In general, Perma Records are public by default and accessible by anyone at the corresponding Perma Link.

When Perma finishes processing your request, it'll direct you to the Perma Record, where you can see the preserved page and the associated Perma Link. You should review the Perma Record to confirm that it displays correctly.

Perma has tools that let you view, organize and annotate the Perma Links and archives you and your organization(s) have created. To manage your Perma Links, click the "Create and manage Perma Links" button. You can annotate any link accessible to you. Click on the item you want to annotate. It'll expand to display more detail, and you can edit the title, add notes, move the link to another folder and view other metadata about the link.

Perma provides two formats for each preserved web page: (1) capture and (2) screenshot.The capture uses the Web ARChive (or "warc") file format. The screenshot is a .png file.

The 21st Edition of The Bluebook Rule 18.2.1(d) states:

“Archiving of Internet sources is encouraged, but only when a reliable archival tool is available.  For citations to Internet sources, append the archive URL to the full citation in brackets” – the rule includes the following example:

Letter from Rose M. Oswald Poels, President/CEO, Wis. Bankers Ass’n, to Elizabeth M. Murphy, Sec’y, SEC (Sept. 17, 2013), http://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-03-13/s70313-178.pdf [http://perma.cc/B7Z7D9DJ].

Perma.cc is also the example used to demonstrate the archived sources rule in the Rule 18.1 Basic Citation Forms for Internet Sources table on page 179:

Rocio Gonzalez, Puerto Rico’s Status Debate Continues as Island Marks 61 Years as a Commonwealth, Huffington Post (July 25, 2013, 9:00 AM), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/25/puerto-rico-status-debate_n_3651755.html [http://perma.cc/C6UP-96HN].