Introduction to Basic Legal Citation - access-to-law home

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.)
§ 1-600. Who Sets Citation Norms
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There is no national citation standard-setting authority, and despite the tendency of citation
manuals to attach the word "rule" to specific citation practices, their authoritative reach is, at
best, limited to a specific sector – those writing for particular journals, editing material for one
or another commercial publisher, submitting briefs to a particular court. For most law writing,
the relevant citations norms are set by widely accepted professional usage.
The citation manual created by the editors of four law journals, the Columbia Law Review, the
Harvard Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal,
invariably referred to as The Bluebook, was for decades the most widely used codification of
national citation norms. Now in its nineteenth edition, The Bluebook governs the citation
practices of the majority of U.S. student-edited law journals and has, through its successive
editions, shaped the citation education and resulting citation habits of most U.S. lawyers.
The new ALWD Citation Manual: A Professional System of Citation (4th ed. 2010) has
quickly gained a wide following in U.S. law schools, and since it aims to reflect current
usage, it is highly consistent with The Bluebook.
An earlier competing academic project, The University of Chicago Manual of Legal Citation,
which called itself the "Maroon Book," offered a distinctly different and less rigid set of rules.
First published in 1989, it failed to win a significant following or affect professional practice
except insofar as it recognized the importance of leaving "a fair amount of discretion to
practitioners, authors, and editors." Id. at 9.
In some states, the norms set out in national manuals are supplemented or overridden by court
rules about the content, composition, and format of legal memoranda and briefs. Most often
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