During the course of your law school career, the blue book is the authoritative format. It is a fact of life. A legal citation follows a standard format which allows a lawyer to refer to legal authority so that other lawyers or judges can locate the document.
The process of editing legal text so that assertions are supported by citations that conform to nationally accepted standards codified in The Bluebook. See Order of signals and Order of authorities.
When lawyers present legal arguments and judges write opinions, they cite authority. They lace their representations of what the law is and how it applies to a given situation with references to statutes, regulations, court rules, and prior appellate decisions they believe to be pertinent and supporting.
The BluebookThe Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, print. The style most commonly used by lawyers and legal scholars.
Pin Cites: All citations must include a pin cite, unless the citation is merely providing the citation for a full case name in text or the citation is a see generally cite in which the entire source makes the point referred to in text.
Supra may be used to refer to a previously fully cited authority, unless id. would be more appropriate or supra cannot be used. In the below examples, supra is appropriate because an authority was fully cited in an earlier footnote, but not the immediately preceding one.
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 retrieval—all of that, without consuming any more space or creating any more ...
A “legal citation” identifies the document and its part where the writer is referring. It also provides the reader with sufficient information to find the document part in the sources. Above all, it furnishes additional information about the referenced material.
The citation is a valuable and concise source of information that includes the name of the parties involved in the action, the year the decision was handed down, the jurisdiction and the court in which the case was heard.
MLA. MLA citation style is most frequently used in the humanities (literature, languages, art). The MLA Handbook was first published by the Modern Language Association in 1951.
The Bluebook: A Uniform System of CitationIn legal research, the most widely used citation guide is The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. The Bluebook employs the use of footnotes, as opposed to parenthetical references usually seen in APA and MLA style.
While there's no one “official” font style for legal documents, there are a few court-approved fonts that are considered most easily readable: Arial. Century (and Century-related fonts like Century Schoolbook) Verdana.