Homework Question on Standard Legal Citation
- As students, you utilize yet another form of citation (APA format) when creating documentation for academic purposes in this course. For purposes of this discussion, you will be addressing standard “legal citation.”
- Why is legal citation important in constructing legal documentation?
- Provide an example or link to a legal document that contains citations.
- Categorize and list the types of citations this document contains and discuss how the types differ.
Homework Answer on Standard Legal Citation
Legal citation is a language used by writers to make references to other writers work or legal authorities. This enables people to follow the argument and make references thereafter to certain cases that happened in the past. It is extremely important because legal proceedings depend much on citation. Users of these documents are in a position to find decisions made and valuable data about a particular case. It therefore acts as a roadmap to merging legal provisions to a case.
Some of the sources that a writer may make reference to include courts decisions (cases), regulations, scholarly writing, treaties, government documents, and statutes. An example of the cited documents is a book presented by Dr. John Geise to the University of Pittsburgh (Dr. John Geise, 2014). The document contains MLA and APA formatted cases, which entails the following issues.
An MLA format incorporates the names of the defendant and the plaintiff. Then, there is the volume name with reference numbers. Next is to have the court name that decided on the case. The next item is the year when the case was decided upon and lastly is the medium consulted for publication. This is different from an APA format that stipulates the following structure of citation. The first thing to do is to introduce the complainant and the defendant of a case.