Legal Citation Abbreviations

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Case citation is a system used in all nations for recognizing and identifying decisions made in past cases conducted in the courts of laws. They are maintained either in a neutral form or in a special series of books called "law reports". Even though legal citations are formatted in different ways in different jurisdictions, most of them contain the same type of basic information.

A legal citation, sometimes referred simply as a "citation", can be defined as an acronym or abbreviation for a law report or other regular or periodic law or legal and authoritative publication directing a reader to the full document. If the cases are published in paper format, the legal citation will generally have information such as year of decision, page number, the volume number and of course the acronym of the reports.

In some report series like for those belonging to Australia and England, the volumes are generally not given individual numbers of the year. So, the volume number and the year are essential for recognizing which book of the series has the case reported within its covers. The Internet, World Wide Web is presently ...
... offers the convenience of web publishing of decisions. Decisions issued by the courts of aw pertaining to many countries all over the world can now be found online. Nowadays, it can be a challenge to find recent law reports in printed format. The typesetting expenses and the expenses pertaining to their publishing are greatly minimized, but reports in printed formats are not always available these days even for important cases.

For lawyers doing research, you can find a legal citations catalogue website, which give meaning to these abbreviations. These are invaluable portals online. A huge volume of information can be found online and where a medium-neutral legal citation system is being followed, it will generally have information such as the decision number, the shortened form of the title of the court (the legal citation per se) and the year in which the decision was made.

As mentioned earlier, legal citations and abbreviations can be obtained from the few legal citation-dedicated websites offering information for researching and even for practising lawyers. Through these portals, people can find legal citations by letters or by jurisdictions or by topic. When it comes to jurisdictions, they can find legal information pertaining to different countries like Zimbabwe, the USA, the UK, India, South Africa, Singapore, Nigeria and the list goes on and on. These portals are kept updated with the latest legal citations, to assist law students and attorneys to properly find and refer to relevant decisions of the courts of Law of their own nation.

This content has been taken from http://goarticles.com/article/Legal-Citation-Abbreviations/7515535/

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