Keep legal propositions traceable to their authority.
Legal publishing repeatedly turns judicial opinions, statutes, regulations, agency materials, government publications, reports, and secondary analysis into propositions for readers. The important question is not simply whether an article contains citations, but whether a reader or editor can identify the particular Authority or Source supporting a substantive legal or factual proposition.
The proposition should lead back to the authority.
An article-level Source List can show which materials were used, but it does not necessarily identify which Authority supports a particular statement about what a court held, what a statute provides, what a regulation requires, or what an agency stated. Legal citation practice treats these as proposition-specific sourcing relationships. The useful connection is not only Article → Sources, but Proposition → Reference → Supporting Authority or Source.
Keep primary legal material distinct from secondary interpretation.
Legal publishers work with Sources that perform different editorial functions. Judicial opinions, statutes, regulations, court documents, and official agency materials can establish what a court, legislature, regulator, or agency actually published. Commentary, scholarship, and reporting may explain or interpret those materials, but they are different Sources. Keeping their identities distinct helps prevent primary legal material and secondary interpretation from becoming interchangeable. The status or legal weight of any Source still depends on jurisdiction and context.
Keep the Reference connected throughout the publishing lifecycle
Formatting a Citation is one step. Keeping the supporting Authority or Source identifiable through a managed Reference from research through later editorial review is another.
Manage the authority as a Reference, not only as citation text
Reusable legal References
Save a persistent Reference identifying a case, statute, regulation, guidance document, report, or other Source instead of recreating its source details whenever it appears in another article.
Proposition-to-source connections
Connect source-dependent legal and factual propositions to managed References identifying the Authorities or Sources actually relied upon.
Reader-facing source displays
Publish managed References as Citations, Footnotes, Tooltips, Bibliographies, or Source Lists according to the needs of the publication.
Citation formatting and reference management solve different problems
Citation formatting controls how an Authority or Source appears. Reference management keeps a reusable structured record identifying it.
| Citation formatting | Reference management |
|---|---|
| How should this Authority or Source appear here? | What Authority or Source supports this proposition, and can we return to its Reference later? |
7 Sources
Law Library of Congress. Legal Research: A Guide to Case Law — Citations. https://guides.loc.gov/case-law/citations
Law Library of Congress. Legal Research: A Guide to Secondary Resources. https://guides.loc.gov/law-secondary-resources
American Bar Association. Litigation News — Style Guidelines 2025–2026. https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/litigation_news/lit-news-style-guidelines.pdf
Office of the Law Revision Counsel, U.S. House of Representatives. U.S. Code — Currency and Updating. https://uscode.house.gov/currency/currency.shtml
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Withdrawn or Expired Guidance. https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/guidance-documents-medical-devices-and-radiation-emitting-products/withdrawn-or-expired-guidance
Peter W. Martin. Basic Legal Citation. https://www.law.cornell.edu/citation/bluebook-quick-reference
Cornell Legal Information Institute. Shepardize — Wex. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/shepardize
Keep the authority behind the proposition identifiable.
A Citation is how the Authority or Source appears in published content. The Reference is the structured record the publisher can keep for publication, later review, corrections, related coverage, and reuse.