Legal Citations

Legal Citations

Legal abbreviations and legal citations are highly interrelated. For example, the “compacting principles of citation”, which reduce the space taken up by the information items included in a citation, include standard abbreviations.

Peter Martin ( in his “Introduction to Basic Legal Citation”) explains that, “because writing by lawyers and judges is so dependent on [citations], [legal citation] is a language of abbreviations and special terms”.

There are several guides of rules of “citation style.

In the United States, the most well-known guides are:

• “The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation”, published by the Harvard Law Review,
• the University of Chicago Manual of Legal Citation,
• Peter Martin’s Introduction to Basic Legal Citation at the Legal Information Institute website, and
• the ALWD Citation Manual written by Darby Dickerson and the Association of Legal Writing Directors. The Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD), an organization of more than 200 members representing approximately 150 law schools, undertook the ambitious project of developing and publishing a new legal citation manual. In early 2000 the years of work came to fruition when the ALWD Citation Manual was published by Aspen Law & Business.

In Canada, the style guide most frequently referenced is the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, published by the McGill Law Journal, and in Australia, Melbourne University Law Review has published the Australian Guide to Legal Citation.

Bluebook and ALWD citation style are quite similar, dealing with the same types of resource works.

These rules help legal writers structure citations in such a way as to help readers identify the type of work cited.

The sequence, formatting, and punctuation separating the different components of the citations helps readers identify the type of source work being referenced, and, hence, assists readers in relocating the source. Knowing the type of source work is essential to relocating a work, since differing types of source works are housed in different locations, and readers will need to use search strategies peculiar to that type of work to relocate it.

Citations of articles in periodicals and cases contain the same sequence of a volume number, journal or reporter abbreviation, page and year. It is of course easy to distinguish between the two, since journal articles usually include an individual author name, and cases begin with a case name. The critical piece of information in each of these citations, however, is the abbreviation used for the serial publication – to relocate a journal article, your readers will need to search in the serials or periodicals held by the library, and then find the volume and page containing the cited material, since libraries do not list the contents of journals by author or article title. Cases can usually be relocated in a number of different locations – either in the law library, or through an online service.

To change:

Over the past two decades, online and disc-based law collections have become primary research tools for many, if not most, lawyers and judges. Simultaneously, the number of alternate sources of individual decisions, regulations, and statutes has exploded. Today, in many jurisdictions, legal research is carried out by means of at least a half dozen competing versions of appellate decisions distributed in print, online, and on disc. Because of these changes, there has been growing pressure on those ultimately responsible for citation norms, namely the courts, to establish new rules that no longer presuppose that some one publisher’s print volume (created over a year after the decisions or statutes it compiles were handed down or enacted) is the key reference. Several jurisdictions have responded; many more are sure to follow. On the other hand, work habits and established practices die hard, especially when they align with vested commercial interests.

In 1996, the American Bar Association approved a resolution recommending that courts adopt a uniform public domain citation system “equally effective for printed case reports and for case reports electronically published on computer disks or network services.” It proceeded to lay out the essential components of such a system. The American Association of Law Libraries had previously gone on record for “vendor and media neutral” citation. An increasing number of state courts have adopted citation schemes embodying the core elements recommended by these national bodies. For example, North Dakota state court opinions released after January 1, 1997 are to be cited according to the following North Dakota Supreme Court rule:

When available, initial citations must include the volume and initial page number of the North Western Reporter in which the opinion is published. The initial citation of any published opinion of the Supreme Court released on or after January 1, 1997, contained in a brief, memorandum, or other document filed with any trial or appellate court and the citation in the table of cases in a brief must also include a reference to the calendar year in which the decision was filed, followed by the court designation of “ND”, followed by a sequential number assigned by the Clerk of the Supreme Court. A paragraph citation should be placed immediately following the sequential number assigned to the case. Subsequent citations within the brief, memorandum or other document must include the paragraph number and sufficient references to identify the initial citation.

For decisions of the North Dakota Court of Appeals, the formula is the same with the substitution of “ND App” for “ND.” As intended, the system facilitates precise and immediate reference to a portion of a North Dakota appellate decision that is as effective whether the reader follows it using the court’s own Web site or one of the commercial online services or finds it in a volume of the North Western Reporter. Since the key citation elements, including paragraph numbers, are embedded in each decision by the court, they are carried over into that print reporter and the commercial electronic services. As a complementary step, the North Dakota Supreme Court Web site furnishes the North Western Reporter citations for all decisions in its database, which currently reaches back through 1966. Consequently, researchers need not consult a commercial source to obtain the volume and page numbers associated with over four decades of decisions.

While the formats and other details vary slightly, several other jurisdictions have implemented case citation schemes employing the same basic structure – case name, year, court, sequential number, and (within the opinion) paragraph number or numbers. In addition to North Dakota these include Colorado, Maine, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. In 2009 Arkansas began to designate its appellate decisions in this way, while retaining page numbers within the court-released pdf file as the means for pinpoint cites. Four other states, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, and, most recently, Illinois, have adopted medium-neutral citation systems, but along significantly different lines. At the federal level, the progress has, to date, been minimal. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit began to apply medium-neutral citations to its own decisions in 1994, but it has never directed attorneys to use them or employed them itself in referring to prior decisions once they have appeared in the Federal Reporter series. Among district courts, the District of South Dakota appears to stand alone. Since 1996, some, although not all, of its judges have applied paragraph numbers and case designations in the format “2008 DSD 6” to their decisions and used the system in citations to them. (See § 2-230.)

Given their quite different structure codified statutes and regulations lend themselves to vendor- and medium-neutral citation. Evolving professional practice, influenced by the prevalence of electronic media, is reducing the hold that certain preferred print editions once held on statute and regulation citations. (See §§ 2-335, 2-410.)

Endnote

EndNote cannot meet all the complex requirements of legal citation styles. It does however have limited capacity to format legal citations, and it is useful as a database for storing citations