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Citation structure and legal citation style guides.
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Citations, whether they are prepared for legal documents or scholarly works, must follow certain rules of structure. These rules, generally referred to as rules of “citation style,” tell writers which components to include in a citation of a particular type of source work, and how to present these components. The most well-known of these guides for legal citation in the US is, of course, The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, published by the Harvard Law Review, but there are several others one should note. In the US, there is the University of Chicago Manual of Legal Citation, Peter Martin’s Introduction to Basic Legal Citation at the Legal Information Institute website, and the new ALWD Citation Manual written by Darby Dickerson and the Association of Legal Writing Directors. 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 recently published the Australian Guide to Legal Citation.
The rules put forward in each of these style guides provide writers with a guide for determining the sequence in which components of the citation are to be presented, the print attributes to be used to format the text, and the punctuation to be used to separate different components. These rules help legal writers structure citations in such a way as to help readers identify the type of work cited (whether it is a case, an article, etc.). Consider the following citations (formatted using the rules outlined in the ALWD Citation Manual), for instance: Chase v. Chase, 22 U.S. 664, 667 (1992).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. For example: we can deduce that the first citation is for a book, from the print attributes: titles of significant works or collections, such as treatises, books, monographs, journal series and the like, are accented in citations with italics or underscoring, and the year of publication, in legal citations, is usually presented in parentheses. With the source work type identified, a reader can search a library system (or the Library of Congress catalog) for a book titled Reading and righting by Arthur James, and find the third edition published by Preston in 1999. It is important to remember that publication information and edition descriptions help readers locate the exact edition of the source work, so that pinpoint cites to material printed on specific pages can be located on the same pages. 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.
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