The Way To Write Legal Citations?

By Author: addiso njai
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Each and every sentence in formal legal research and writing needs to be supported properly by an authority. When it comes to support, the writer can get it from several sources. One is statute, the other is case law and still yet, law books and journals. Case laws are nothing more than the rules resulting from judicial opinions, the judgments of the Courts over the years if not centuries. On the other hand, the statutes are rules written by elected assemblieslegislatures. Law book and law journals (sometimes called law revierws) are authoritative writngs on discreet areas of the law.

It is essential that legal citations from law reports and law journals be formatted in a particular way. Its purpose should lead the reader to the exact source from which the writer of these quotations has found the information. With the help of legal citations, the writer adds credibility and strength to his assertions and arguments.

Here are some of the tips for legal writers:

You can paraphrase or quote a block of information cited and remembering to end your extract with a period. It is always recommended to begin the quotation ...
... directly at the beginning of the sentence containing the information or quote. The citation should be presented inits own separate sentence, preferably indented and surrounded by quotation marks.

You should present the name of the case in underlined or italic format and also you can use abbreviations for common terms like "Co." for Corporation and "Inc." for Incorporated.

The proper style presents the name of the case as officially shown on Court records: the name of both the parties involved and these names should be separated by a v. as an abbreviation for "versus". In traditional form, this part of the citation should end with a common and italic font should not be used in the comma. The comma should be followed by the precise reporter information. Here, the first number should represent the volume of the law report and next, the formal abbreviation of the reporter (aka the legal citation) should be inserted. The number after the reference to the law report refers to the page number of the issue of the law report or law journal.

You can pinpoint the citation by adding a comma after the citation’s page number and you can also list the exact page from where one can find the extract. Also, do not forget to list the year of the decision: this information can be added in parenthesis after the page number(s).

Then, in the legal citation, you will have to paraphrase or refer the information you are finding. The citation can be ended with a period.

Before actually beginning the process of legal writing, you can refer to the best websites that are offering the free service of authoritative legal citations and abbreviations. Most are pay-per-use but there is at least one very good free legal citation guide. When you can defer to these types of information portals, the process of legal writing is inttantly much easier. Some sites even allow the legal writer who is writing for the Internet, to hyperlink the legal citation to the actual legal citation on the third-party website; a clear value-added to the users who can, with a single click, find out about the law report or law journal.

This content has been taken from http://goarticles.com/article/How-To-Write-Legal-Citations/7411519/

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