APPENDIX A LEGAL CITATION

• Jurisdiction: Oregon

Appendix A Legal Citation

A legal document must convince a lawyer or a judge reading it that its arguments were well researched and its analysis is well supported. One way legal writers do this is by providing references to the authorities used to develop that analysis and reach the conclusion. These references are called legal citations. They tell the reader where to find the authorities relied on and indicate the level of analytical support the authorities provide. Citations allow legal writers to give credit for every idea borrowed from a case, statute, or other source.¹ In a legal document, every legal rule and every explanation of the law must be cited.

Legal citations are included in the text of legal documents rather than being saved for a bibliography. While law students initially feel that these citations clutter documents, attorneys appreciate the valuable information that citations provide.

The format used to convey citation information requires meticulous attention to such tedious details as whether a space is needed between two abbreviations. In this respect, citation format rules can be like fundamental writing rules, which are based on convention, not reason. Why capitalize the personal pronoun "I" but not "we" or "you" or "they"? Why does a comma signify a pause, while a period indicates a stop? Rather than trying to understand why citations are formatted the way they are, the most practical approach is simply to learn citation rules and apply them. Frequent repetition will make them second nature.

Of the many different citation systems that exist, this chapter addresses state citation rules as well as the two national citation manuals, the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation² and The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation.³ In law practice, you may encounter state statutes, court rules, and style manuals that dictate the form of citation used before the courts of different states. You may find that each firm or agency that you work for has its own preference for citation or makes minor variations to generally accepted format. Some law offices have their own style manuals, drawn from state rules and national manuals. Once you are aware of the basic function and format of citation, adapting to a slightly different set of rules is not difficult.

I. Oregon Citation Rules

Most states have their own rules of citation, called local rules. These rules differ somewhat from the rules of other states and the rules in the two national citation manuals. In Oregon, two sources of citation rules are the Uniform Trial Court Rules (UTCR) and the Oregon Appellate Courts Style Manual (OSM). Documents filed in Oregon courts must conform to these rules.⁴ Lawyers practicing in Oregon generally follow these rules, even when they are not submitting documents to Oregon courts. Examples are given in Table A-1.

Table A-1. Example Citations Under Oregon Local Rules

Statutes ORS 164.225.

Cases Hoffman v. Freeman Land and Timber, LLC., 329 Or 554 (1999). State v. Reid, 36 Or App 417 (1978). Linder v. Dept. of Rev., 18 OTR 11 (2004). Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 349 US 294 (1955).

State Rules OAR 808-003-0010. [Oregon Administrative Rules] ORCP 71 B(1)(b). [Oregon Rules of Civil Procedure]

Federal Rules FRE 802. [Federal Rules of Evidence]

Under these rules, no periods are used in reporter abbreviations. Thus, Oregon Reports and Oregon Reports, Court of Appeals are abbreviated "Or" and "Or App" without punctuation. When citing Oregon Revised Statutes while working in Oregon, use the abbreviation "ORS." Do not include the date when referring to the current code. After using an online service or West's Oregon Revised Statutes Annotated (WORSA) to conduct your research, confirm the statutory language in ORS and cite to that official source.

The OSM includes examples of citations for constitutions, legislative material, rules of civil procedure and evidence, administrative rules, and much more. It also contains a writing style guide that addresses such things as capitalization, punctuation, word usage, and parallel construction. The OSM is available online at www.publications.ojd.state.or.us (listed under "Document Links").

II. Other States' Citation Rules

When working in another state, follow that state's local rules or use the format given in the ALWD Guide or the Bluebook, depending on your supervisor's preferences. In the state of Washington, for example, the Office of Reporter of Decisions publishes a style sheet that determines citations to be used in documents submitted to Washington courts. The abbreviations required by that style sheet are familiar to lawyers practicing in Washington, but may be confusing to lawyers elsewhere.

III. The National Citation Manuals

While state citation rules often provide only rules and examples, national citation manuals also attempt to explain in some detail the components of citations. There are two national citation manuals currently popular, the ALWD Guide and the Bluebook. The content and format of citations produced by the two manuals is identical; note in Table A-2, however, that different typeface is required for footnotes in law review articles.

Table A-2. Comparison of Citation Formats

Oregon Style Manual	ORS 164.225.
ALWD and Bluebook Practice Documents	Or. Rev. Stat. §164.225 (2015).
ALWD and Bluebook Law Review Articles	Or. Rev. Stat. § 164.225 (2015).

A. ALWD Guide

The Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) publishes a citation manual that focuses on practice-oriented documents. The explanations are clear, and the examples are useful to both law students and practicing attorneys. The fifth edition was published in 2014 under the name ALWD Guide to Legal Citation.

Three finding tools lead to relevant rules in the ALWD Guide. First, the table of contents lays out the organization of the rules in the guide. Second, and often more helpful for locating particular rules, is the index at the back of the guide. Third, inside the front cover is a table of "Fast Formats," which refers you to pages where example citations are provided.

Appendix 1 at the back of the guide lists abbreviations for primary sources of law for each state, presented alphabetically, along with resources for federal, Native American, and territorial law. For Oregon, this appendix includes abbreviations for state and regional reporters, state statutes and regulations, the state constitution, etc. Appendix 3E gives abbreviations to use for case names in citations, Appendix 4 provides abbreviations for courts, and Appendix 5 includes abbreviations for law journals.

B. Bluebook

Since 1926, student editors of four Ivy League law reviews have developed citation rules that are published as The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. The Oregon Appellate Courts Style Manual defers to the Bluebook for rules not covered in the state manual.⁵ Many law firms, agencies, and organizations consider Bluebook citations the norm, although few practicing lawyers know its current rules; most assume that the Bluebook rules have not changed since they were in law school.

For practicing attorneys, the primary difficulty with the Bluebook is that most of it is devoted to citations used for articles published in law journals. The rules most important to attorneys...