Introduction to Basic Legal Citation

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Guide To Legal Citation
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Legal Citation

• The ALWD Guide to Legal Citation explains legal
  citation formats for all types of legal documents
  in a clear, pedagogically sound manner. The
  Guides plain language, numerous examples, and
  clear, integrated structure to explaining the
  legal system of citation for legal materials is
  easy for students, professors, practitioners, and
  judges to understand and use. It was written and
  vetted by legal writing professors who have
  decades of experience teaching the citation
  format. One of the Guides fundamental goals is
  to be a restatement of the rules of citation to
  make citation easier to teach, easier to learn,
  and easier to do. To that end, it has three
  distinguishing features.

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• The citations that result from using the Guide
  are identical to legal citations advanced in
  other legal citation manuals, but the Guide is
  written with teaching and learning in mind.
• The Guide seamlessly integrates the citation
  rules used in practice-based documents with those
  used in academic footnotes.
• In addition to clear explanations, the Guide
  provides abundant illustrations and examples of
  proper citation formats for the many types of
  source materials cited in legal documents.

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What is the Purpose of Legal Citations

• The task of "legal citation" in short is to
  provide sufficient information to the reader of a
  brief or memorandum to aid a decision about which
  authorities to check as well as in what order to
  consult them and to permit efficient and precise
  retrievalall of that, without consuming any more
  space or creating any more .

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Legal Citation Basics

• Most legal citations consist of the name of the
  document (case, statute, law review article), an
  abbreviation for the legal series, and the date.
  The abbreviation for the legal series usually
  appears as a number followed by the abbreviated
  name of the series and ends in another number.

Citing Legal and Government Documents
Lawyers and scholars of the law have developed
their own methods to Guide citing legal materials
in such documents as court briefs and law
journals. Some other general style manuals have
also developed specific rules for citing legal
materials.