Write on

• Citation: Vol. 45 No. 6 Pg. 44
• Pages: 44
• Publication year: 2022

Write On Vol. 45 No. 6 Pg. 44 Wyoming Bar Journal December, 2022

Explanatory Parentheticals

Michael R. Smith

University of Wyoming College of Law Laramie, Wyoming

A popular strategy employed by experienced legal writers is to include an explanatory parenthetical as part of a citation sentence. An explanatory parenthetical is a short parenthetical statement that explains how a cited authority relates to or illustrates the proposition stated immediately before the citation sentence.^[1] In this edition of this column, I will summarize the basic formatting rules for explanatory parentheticals in legal writing.

We can see an example of an explanatory parenthetical in the following excerpt from the recent Wyoming Supreme Court case of Davidson-Eaton v. Iversen^[2]:

For an oral contract to exist, its essential terms must be defined with certainty. . . . Courts do not have the power to supply the terms of an agreement, so an oral agreement is unenforceable unless the contract terms are "so certain that the court can require the specific thing agreed upon to be done." Fowler, 933 P.2d at 504; Rialto Theatre, Inc. v. Commonwealth Theatres, Inc., 714 P.2d 328, 334-35 (Wyo. 1986) (finding a lease agreement without definite terms is an agreement to agree in the future which the court could not enforce because it would require the court to supply the terms of the agreement).^[3]

In this excerpt, the writer of the opinion, Wyoming Supreme Court Justice John G. Fenn, states a rule about the enforceability of an oral agreement and then includes an explanatory parenthetical for one of the cases-the Rialto Theatre case-that he cites for the rule. This example illustrates several important formatting rules for explanatory parentheticals:

• An explanatory parenthetical is part of a citation sentence, and it is included with the citation of the authority to which it relates. In the example above, Justice Fenn states a rule and then, in a citation sentence, cites two cases, the Fowler case and the Rialto Theatre case. The explanatory parenthetical in the citation sentence relates to the Rialto Theatre case and is included with the citation to that case. Notice that the explanatory parenthetical comes after the parenthetical containing the court and the year of the Rialto Theatre case, with a space between the two parentheticals. Notice also that if a writer cites multiple authorities in a citation sentence, the writer is under no obligation...