Legal Research and Citation Style in the USA

The format for citations to legal materials is different from the format for scholarly citations to books and periodicals in general. This handout is a terse guide to legal citation in the USA. The generally accepted style manual for legal citations in the USA is the Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, which is published by the editors of four prestigious law reviews at Columbia University, Harvard, Univ. of Pennsylvania, and Yale Law Schools. A copy of theBluebook can be purchased in any law school bookstore. A comprehensive set of rules from the Bluebook is available on the Internet from Peter W. Martin at Cornell Law School. In contrast, this handout here contains a terse set of rules that agree with the Bluebook, but does not contain all of the fine points and options in the Bluebook. Opinions of some courts use a different format from the Bluebook, but these alternative citation formats contains the same information. Be aware that citations in opinions of state or federal courts may not be the correct bibliographic style according to the Bluebook.Furthermore, the proper format according to the Bluebook changes with time, so old sources (both cases and law review articles) do not use the modern format for citation.

Standler, Ronald B. RBS0.com (2000). Reference>Style Guides>Legal

Technical Writing

I began this document in 1978, when I was teaching undergraduate classes in electrical engineering and found that my students needed some guidance on grammar and style. I enlarged this document frequently during my ten years as a professor. During 1990-95, I shared this document with my colleagues in Germany who wanted to know more about style in American English. The favorable reaction of my former students and my German colleagues has encouraged me to post this document on the Internet, in the hope that it might be useful to a wider audience.

Standler, Ronald B. RBS0.com (1978). Resources>Directories>TC