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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. Typically, a proper legal
citation 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 o ...
will inform the reader about a source's
authority In the fields of sociology and political science, authority is the legitimate power of a person or group over other people. In a civil state, ''authority'' is practiced in ways such a judicial branch or an executive branch of government.''T ...
, how strongly the source supports the writer's
proposition In logic and linguistics, a proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence. In philosophy, " meaning" is understood to be a non-linguistic entity which is shared by all sentences with the same meaning. Equivalently, a proposition is the no ...
, its age, and other,
relevant Relevant is something directly related, connected or pertinent to a topic; it may also mean something that is current. Relevant may also refer to: * Relevant operator, a concept in physics, see renormalization group * Relevant, Ain, a commune ...
information. This is an example citation to a
United States Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...
court case: :::''Griswold v. Connecticut'', 381 U.S. 479, 480 (1965). This citation gives helpful
information Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random, ...
about the cited authority to the reader. * The names of the parties are Griswold and Connecticut. Generally, the name of the plaintiff (or, on appeal, petitioner) appears first, whereas the name of the defendant (or, on appeal, respondent) appears second. Thus, the case is '' Griswold v. Connecticut''. * The case is reported in volume 381 of the
United States Reports The ''United States Reports'' () are the official record ( law reports) of the Supreme Court of the United States. They include rulings, orders, case tables (list of every case decided), in alphabetical order both by the name of the petitioner ...
(abbreviated "U.S."). The case begins on page 479 of that volume of the report. The authoritative supporting material for the writer's proposition is on page 480. The reference to page 480 is referred to as a "pin cite" or "pinpoint." * The Supreme Court decided the case. Because the U.S. Reports publish only cases that the Supreme Court decides, the court deciding the case may be inferred from the reporter. * The authority supports the proposition directly because it is not qualified with a signal. If it had offered only indirect or inferential support for the proposition, the author should have preceded the cite with a qualifying signal such as ''see'' or ''cf.'' * The authority is from 1965, so either the clear and enduring wisdom of this source has been venerated by the test of time, or this clearly dated relic of another era is obviously ripe for revision, depending upon the needs of the writer. 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.


Legal citation analysis

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 A citation graph (or citation network), in information science and bibliometrics, is a directed graph that describes the citations within a collection of documents. Each vertex (or node) in the graph represents a document in the collection, an ...
extracted from a
regulatory Regulation is the management of complex systems according to a set of rules and trends. In systems theory, these types of rules exist in various fields of biology and society, but the term has slightly different meanings according to context. ...
document, which could supplement E-discovery - a process that leverages on technological innovations in big data analytics. by Cat Casey and Alejandra Perez 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.


Citation by country

Some countries have a
de facto ''De facto'' ( ; , "in fact") describes practices that exist in reality, whether or not they are officially recognized by laws or other formal norms. It is commonly used to refer to what happens in practice, in contrast with '' de jure'' ("by l ...
citation standard that has been adopted by most of the country's institutions. ;Australia:
Australian legal citation 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 ci ...
usually follows the ''
Australian Guide to Legal Citation The ''Australian Guide to Legal Citation'' (AGLC) is published by the Melbourne University Law Review Association in collaboration with the ''Melbourne Journal of International Law'' and seeks to provide the Australian legal community with a st ...
'' (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 is the system of legal citation for Ireland. 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'' (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''. ;USA: U. S. legal citation follows one of: * Bluebook standard * ALWD Citation Manual * Tanbook (New York State Official Reports Style Manual) *
Greenbook The Greenbook of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (called the Greenbook for short) is a book with projections of various economic indicators for the economy of the United States produced by the Federal Reserve Board before each meeting of t ...
(Texas Style Manual, supplements Bluebook) *
Maroonbook 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 Chica ...
(University of Chicago Law School) A number of U.S. states have adopted individual public domain citations standards.


See also

* Case citation * Citation analysis * Citation of United Kingdom legislation * Legal citation signals * Oxford Standard for Citation Of Legal Authorities or " OSCOLA" *
Sub nomine A number of Latin terms are used in legal terminology and legal maxims. This is a partial list of these terms, which are wholly or substantially drawn from Latin. __TOC__ Common law Civil law Ecclesiastical law See also * B ...
* Main path analysis


References


External links


Tanbook
(New York State Official Reports Style Manual)
Common Abbreviations and Legal Citation Examples for Selected Federal Government Documents
(Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C.) {{DEFAULTSORT:Legal Citation