Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

The Law Of Citation And Citation Of Law, Chin-Shih Tang

Dalhousie Law Journal

Legal citation is based primarily upon the writing habits of a particular profession - lawyers. In all its form, it is mostly a matter of convention, sometimes learned, always untaught. As one of the technical subjects in law, it may well be the most difficult topic in legal research and writing. This is partly because its method tends to concern more with adopted convention than with the abstraction of principles governing the intricacies of citation. Partly it is because there are more precedents for the adoption of a specific convention than there is for the law of citation itself. The …