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Reading Legal Citations

Legal citations convey a lot of information about the referred to source in a very compact manner. The more you know about legal citations, the more information you can glean in a very short time.

What's in a Secondary Source Citation?

Secondary source citations include the author and title of the work, the page being referenced, and the date of the publication.

When the cited work is a law review article it will also include information on how to locate the article in print by including the volume number, name of the publication, and first page of the work right before it has the pinpoint page number.

Citations to books include the name of the publisher.  If a book is more than one volume the the number before the title is the volume number, while the number after the title is the page being referenced.

Secondary Source Citation Examples

Law review article citationchart showing the different parts of a secondary source citation