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

what turns out to have been a short-lived branding strategy of Reed Elsevier (the corporate
parent of LexisNexis) would have citations to "Burns" (and U.S.C.S. plus many more)
attributed to "Lexis." Currently, however, the online versions of "Burns" show the parent
brand "LexisNexis" prominently and indicate that copyright is held by Matthew Bender &
Company, "a member of the LexisNexis Group." Meanwhile, Thomson Reuters has returned
to placing the brand "West" on its legal publications and services that, for a time, gave greater
prominence to the Thomson name. Finally, the ALWD Citation Manual includes the publisher
"Lexis" in citations to the Alaska Statutes ("Alaska Stat. § x (Lexis year)"), but The Bluebook
does not ("Alaska Stat. § x (year)") since that compilation is official.
§ 2-335(2) Examples
– Mich. Comp. Laws § x (year through ___). [More complete "current through" date
in place of year of "publication."]
– Ind. Code § x (year through ___). [More complete "current through" date in place
of year of "publication."]
Point 2: It is the practice in the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Courts of Appeals, and a
majority of state courts to omit currency information from statute citations altogether unless
the provisions have been or are likely to be subject to amendment. Further, as already noted in
§ 2-320, methods of indicating the currency of a cited statutory compilation are in flux.
Traditional practice, based on the updating frequency of print compilations, called only for the
year of the compilation cited. Regularly updated electronic versions of state statutes generally
provide information on their cutoff or currency date with greater precision. Often this is
specified not as a date, per se, but in terms of a "legislative event" – the last included
enactment or the end of a session. The AALL Universal Citation Guide argues that the
addition of this more exact currency information to the year is a more effective measure than
year of publication or compilation alone in alerting the reader to the risk that the version of
the statute he or she consults may be different, by virtue of legislative change, from that
referenced by the citation. However, this recommendation has yet to be widely adopted.
§ 2-335(3) Examples
– AS x. [Per Alaska Supreme Court citation practice when citing to Alaska Statutes.]
– KRS x. [Per Kentucky Supreme Court citation practice when citing to Kentucky
Revised Statutes.]
– R.C. x. [Per Ohio Supreme Court citation practice when citing to Ohio Revised
Code.]
Point 3: One area of citation practice on which there is widespread state variation is the
abbreviation of the state's own code. The abbreviations used on the examples in this
introduction (§ 3-320), like the two dominant national citation references, are full enough to
distinguish unambiguously between a citation to a provision of the Alaska Statutes and a
section of the codes of Alabama, Arizona and Arkansas. Indeed, a standard and recurring
component of state statute and regulation citations is an abbreviation of the state name. When
context leaves little or no doubt about which state's statutes are being cited, including
importantly briefs submitted to and decisions rendered by the courts of a particular state,
significant citation space can saved with little or no loss by having the state name supplied by
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