Legal citation

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Legal citation is the practice of crediting and referring to authoritative documents and sources. The most common sources of authority cited are court decisions (cases), statutes, regulations, government documents, treaties, and scholarly writing.

Contents

Typically, a proper legal citation will inform the reader about a source's authority, how strongly the source supports the writer's proposition, its age, and other, relevant information. This is an example citation to a United States Supreme Court court case:

Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 480 (1965).

This citation gives helpful information about the cited authority to the reader.

Concurring and dissenting opinions are also published alongside the Court's opinion. For example, to cite to the opinion in which Justices Stewart and Black dissent, the citation would appear as the following:

Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 527 (1965) (Stewart & Black, JJ., dissenting).

This citation is very similar to the citation to the Court's opinion. The two key differences are the pin cite, page 527 here, and the addition of the dissenting justices' names in a parenthetical following the date of the case.

Of course, legal citation in general and case citation in particular can become much more complicated.

During a legal proceeding, a 'legal citation analysis' - i.e. using citation analysis technique for analyzing legal documents - facilitates the better understanding of the inter-related regulatory compliance documents by the exploration of the citations that connect provisions to other provisions within the same document or between different documents. Legal citation analysis involves the use of a citation graph extracted from a regulatory document, which could supplement E-discovery - a process that leverages on technological innovations in big data analytics. [1] [2] [3] [4] Main path analysis, a method that traces the significant citation chains in a citation graph, can be used to trace the opinion changes over the years for a target legal domain. [5]

Citation by country

Some countries have a de facto citation standard that has been adopted by most of the country's institutions.

Australia
Australian legal citation usually follows the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (commonly known as AGLC)
Canada
Canadian legal citation usually follows the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (commonly called the McGill Guide)
Germany
German legal citation
Ireland
OSCOLA Ireland [6] is the system of legal citation for Ireland. [7] OSCOLA Ireland was adapted from the Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities. It is edited by a group of Irish academics, in consultation with both the OSCOLA Ireland Editorial Advisory Board, and the OSCOLA Editorial Advisory Board.
Netherlands
Dutch legal citation follows the Leidraad voor juridische auteurs [8] (commonly known as Leidraad)
United Kingdom
The Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities (commonly known as OSCOLA) is the modern authority on citation of United Kingdom legislation. Guidance for UK government drafters is provided in Statutory Instrument Practice. [9]
USA

U. S. legal citation follows one of:

A number of U.S. states have adopted individual public domain citations standards. [11]

See also

Related Research Articles

In law, a citation or introductory signal is a set of phrases or words used to clarify the authority of a legal citation as it relates to a proposition. It is used in citations to present authorities and indicate how those authorities relate to propositions in statements. Legal writers use citation signals to tell readers how the citations support their propositions, organizing citations in a hierarchy of importance so the reader can quickly determine the relative weight of a citation. Citation signals help a reader to discern meaning or usefulness of a reference when the reference itself provides inadequate information.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citation</span> Reference to a source

A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works of others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears.

Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects the liberty of married couples to use contraceptives without government restriction. The case involved a Connecticut "Comstock law" that prohibited any person from using "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception". The court held that the statute was unconstitutional, and that its effect was "to deny disadvantaged citizens ... access to medical assistance and up-to-date information in respect to proper methods of birth control." By a vote of 7–2, the Supreme Court invalidated the law on the grounds that it violated the "right to marital privacy", establishing the basis for the right to privacy with respect to intimate practices. This and other cases view the right to privacy as "protected from governmental intrusion".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Case citation</span> System for uniquely identifying individual rulings of a court

Case citation is a system used by legal professionals to identify past court case decisions, either in series of books called reporters or law reports, or in a neutral style that identifies a decision regardless of where it is reported. Case citations are formatted differently in different jurisdictions, but generally contain the same key information.

<i>Bluebook</i> Style guide on legal citation

The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation is a style guide that prescribes the most widely used legal citation system in the United States. It is taught and used at a majority of U.S. law schools and is also used in a majority of federal courts. Legal publishers also use several "house" citation styles in their works.

Substantive due process is a principle in United States constitutional law that allows courts to establish and protect substantive laws and certain fundamental rights from government interference, even if they are unenumerated elsewhere in the U.S. Constitution. Courts have asserted that such protections come from the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibit the federal and state governments, respectively, from depriving any person of "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Substantive due process demarks the line between those acts that courts hold to be subject to government regulation or legislation and those that courts place beyond the reach of governmental interference. Whether the Fifth or Fourteenth Amendments were intended to serve that function continues to be a matter of scholarly as well as judicial discussion and dissent. In 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas called on the Supreme Court to reconsider all of its rulings that were based on substantive due process.

<i>ALWD Guide to Legal Citation</i>

ALWD Guide to Legal Citation, formerly ALWD Citation Manual, is a style guide providing a legal citation system for the United States, compiled by the Association of Legal Writing Directors. Its first edition was published in 2000, under editor Darby Dickerson. Its seventh edition, under editor Carolyn V. Williams, was released in May 2021 by Aspen Publishing. The ALWD Guide to Legal Citation is published as a spiral-bound book as well as an online version.

Citation analysis is the examination of the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citations in documents. It uses the directed graph of citations — links from one document to another document — to reveal properties of the documents. A typical aim would be to identify the most important documents in a collection. A classic example is that of the citations between academic articles and books. For another example, judges of law support their judgements by referring back to judgements made in earlier cases. An additional example is provided by patents which contain prior art, citation of earlier patents relevant to the current claim. The digitization of patent data and increasing computing power have led to a community of practice that uses these citation data to measure innovation attributes, trace knowledge flows, and map innovation networks.

<i>New York v. Onofre</i> 1980 New York Court of Appeals Case that Repealed Sodomy Law

The People v. Ronald Onofre, 51 N.Y.2d 476, 415 N.E.2d 936, 434 N.Y.S.2d 947 (1980), was an appeal against New York's sodomy laws, decided in the New York Court of Appeals.

<i>United States Reports</i> United States Supreme Court decisions

The United States Reports are the official record of the Supreme Court of the United States. They include rulings, orders, case tables, in alphabetical order both by the name of the petitioner and by the name of the respondent, and other proceedings. United States Reports, once printed and bound, are the final version of court opinions and cannot be changed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Legal writing</span> Pleading in civil and criminal law

Legal writing involves the analysis of fact patterns and presentation of arguments in documents such as legal memoranda and briefs. One form of legal writing involves drafting a balanced analysis of a legal problem or issue. Another form of legal writing is persuasive, and advocates in favor of a legal position. Another form legal writing involves drafting legal instruments, such as contracts and wills.

Citation of United Kingdom legislation includes the systems used for legislation passed by devolved parliaments and assemblies, for secondary legislation, and for prerogative instruments. It is relatively complex both due to the different sources of legislation in the United Kingdom, and because of the different histories of the constituent countries of the United Kingdom.

In legal research, a citator is a citation index of legal resources, one of the best-known of which in the United States is Shepard's Citations. Given a reference of a legal decision, a citator allows the researcher to find newer documents which cite the original document and thus to reconstruct the judicial history of cases and statutes. A citator can also be used to determine whether a statute or regulation has been amended, repealed, superseded, or held unconstitutional. Using a citator in this way is colloquially referred to as "Shepardizing".

Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618 (1969), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that invalidated state durational residency requirements for public assistance and helped establish a fundamental 'right to travel' in U.S. law. It was a part of a set of three welfare cases, Harrell v. Tobriner and Smith v. Reynolds all heard during the 1968-1969 period by the Supreme Court. Shapiro v. Thompson, King v. Smith and Goldberg v. Kelly were a set of successful Supreme Court cases that dealt with welfare, specifically referred to as a part of 'The Welfare Cases'.

<i>Australian Guide to Legal Citation</i> Guide for the citation style used in legal writing in Australia

The Australian Guide to Legal Citation (AGLC) is published by the Melbourne University Law Review in collaboration with the Melbourne Journal of International Law and seeks to provide the Australian legal community with a standard for citing legal sources. There is no single standard for legal citation in Australia, but the AGLC is the most widely used.

The Oxford University Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA) is a style guide that provides the modern method of legal citation in the United Kingdom; the style itself is also referred to as OSCOLA. First developed by Peter Birks of the University of Oxford Faculty of Law, and now in its 4th edition, it has been adopted by most law schools and many legal publishers in the United Kingdom. An online supplement is available for the citation of international legal cases, not covered in the main guide.

A table of authorities is part of a legal brief that contains an index of the cases, statutes, and secondary sources cited. This article deals specifically with the characteristics of tables of authorities in the United States. The table of authorities, often called a TOA, is frequently a legal requirement for litigation briefs; the various state courts have different rules as to what kinds of briefs require a TOA. The TOA list has the name of the authority followed by the page number or numbers on which each authority appears, and the authorities are commonly listed in alphabetical order within each grouping. The intention is to allow law clerks and judges to easily and rapidly identify and access the legal authorities cited in a litigation brief.

The Maroonbook is a system of legal citation that is intended to be simpler and more straightforward than the more widely used Bluebook. It was developed at the University of Chicago and is the citation system for the University of Chicago Law Review. As a simplified and modernized citation method, it tends to be closer to the Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities in its conventions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Penumbra (law)</span> Rights derived from rights protected in the Bill of Rights

In United States constitutional law, the penumbra includes a group of rights derived, by implication, from other rights explicitly protected in the Bill of Rights. These rights have been identified through a process of "reasoning-by-interpolation", where specific principles are recognized from "general idea[s]" that are explicitly expressed in other constitutional provisions. Although researchers have traced the origin of the term to the nineteenth century, the term first gained significant popular attention in 1965, when Justice William O. Douglas's majority opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut identified a right to privacy in the penumbra of the constitution.

<i>California Style Manual</i> Legal style manual for California courts

The California Style Manual, as provided by order of the California Supreme Court and pursuant to statute, is "the official organ for the styles to be used in the publication of the Official Reports" of decisions by California's courts. A person filing a document in a California state court may use either the style for legal citations prescribed in the Manual or the very different system promulgated in The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, but must use the same style consistently throughout the document. Most California state courts, and lawyers practicing in those courts, use the Manual's citation style. The current (fourth) edition of the Manual, published in 2000 by West Group, is freely available online at the Sixth District Appellate Program webpage.

References

  1. Hamou-Lhadj, Abdelwahab; Hamdaqa, Mohammad (2009). "Citation Analysis: An Approach for Facilitating the Understanding and the Analysis of Regulatory Compliance Documents". 2009 Sixth International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations. pp. 278–283. doi:10.1109/ITNG.2009.161. ISBN   978-1-4244-3770-2. S2CID   10083351.[ dead link ]
  2. Mohammad Hamdaqa and A. Hamou-Lhadj, "Citation Analysis: An Approach for Facilitating the Understanding and the Analysis of Regulatory Compliance Documents", In Proc. of the 6th International Conference on Information Technology, Las Vegas, USA
  3. "E-Discovery Special Report: The Rising Tide of Nonlinear Review". Hudson Legal. Archived from the original on July 3, 2012. Retrieved July 1, 2012. by Cat Casey and Alejandra Perez
  4. "What Technology-Assisted Electronic Discovery Teaches Us About The Role Of Humans In Technology - Re-Humanizing Technology-Assisted Review". Forbes . Retrieved July 1, 2012.
  5. Liu, John S.; Chen, Hsiao-Hui; Ho, Mei Hsiu-Ching; Li, Yu-Chen (December 1, 2014). "Citations with different levels of relevancy: Tracing the main paths of legal opinions". Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 65 (12): 2479–2488. doi:10.1002/asi.23135. ISSN   2330-1643. S2CID   5294434.
  6. "OSCOLA Ireland". legalcitation.ie. Retrieved November 27, 2016.
  7. Schweppe, Jennifer; Kennedy, Rónán; Donnelly, Lawrence (2016). How to think, write and cite Key skills for Irish law students (2nd ed.). Round Hall.
  8. "Kluwer - Leidraad". Kluwer.nl. Retrieved November 16, 2013.
  9. "Statutory Instrument Practice 4th edition". OPSI website . London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office. November 2006. pp. 23–24 (s. 2.7) and 25–28 (s. 2.11). Archived from the original on December 11, 2006. Retrieved October 17, 2009.{{cite web}}: External link in |work= (help)
  10. Jessen, Edward W. (2000). California Style Manual: A Handbook of Legal Style for California Courts and Lawyers (4th ed.). Thomson West. ISBN   9780314233707.
  11. "Universal Citation" . Retrieved August 7, 2008.