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

sequential number assigned by the Clerk of the Supreme Court. A paragraph citation should
be placed immediately following the sequential number assigned to the case. Subsequent
citations within the brief, memorandum or other document must include the paragraph
number and sufficient references to identify the initial citation.
N.D. R. Ct. Rule 11.6 (b).
The Rule supplies examples, e.g.:
• Smith v. Jones, 1997 ND 15, 600 N.W.2d 900 (fictional).
• Smith v. Jones, 1996 ND 15, 21, 600 N.W.2d 900 (fictional).
For decisions of the North Dakota Court of Appeals, the formula is the same with the
substitution of "ND App" for "ND." In jurisdictions adopting such a vendor- and mediumneutral
citation scheme, that scheme should be used, together with one or more parallel
reporter citations as may, indeed, be required by court rule or local practice.
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 the significantly different
lines noted below. 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.
Ohio's case numbering approach operates across the entire state court system rather than court
by court, with the result that successive decisions of the state supreme court may be numbered
3957 and 3995. (These system-wide numbers are assigned by the state's reporter of decisions.)
Illinois, Louisiana, and Mississippi use the docket number as the case ID rather than
generating a new one based on year and decision sequence. In addition, Louisiana uses slip
opinion page numbers rather than paragraph numbers for pinpoint citation. The U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Sixth Circuit does the same.
§ 2-240. Case Citations – Conditional Items [BB|ALWD]
The core of a case citation includes at least two items that communicate by their absence. In
other words, a case citation is read with the expectation that if certain things have occurred
they will be reported as additional elements of a reference. Citations that are silent on these
subjects are taken as representing that these facts are absent.
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