Rule 83.2 of the Civil Rules deals with citation to authority. The Superior Court requires the practitioner to provide the court with unavailable authority, but this is not specifically defined. Any authority not available in the Commonwealth Law Library, such as a treatise or law review article, must be attached in a length that is enough to provide a full understanding of the author's opinion. At this point, I believe the law library is out of date by possibly 10 years. This is because the Court decided a long time ago to put its resources on the side of progressiveness, and began subscribing to electronic research services. It seems to me that this rule is expansive on purpose. The Court currently subscribes to Westlaw, and so I would say that any citation to authority which is available on Westlaw would be equivalent to the law library. Anything else would need to be attached to the back of the papers. Also in the rule is that the Superior Court doesn't want to see secondary authority cited (such as Am.Jur.) if there is primary authority available . But if you have to cite a secondary source, it is permissible to cite with a parenthetical explaining why primary wasn't available.
Similarly, the District Court's Local Rules say that all citations should be in a generally recognized form, and any authority not available in the court's law library must be provided to the court. See LR 5.2 (c) and (d). It appears that the District Court is also open to reviewing citations of unpublished decisions as long as they are made available to the Court. In addition, there are courts which have argued that Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3 does not bar citations to unpublished decisions from other circuits. See Alvarenga-Villalobos v.