Author ORCID Identifier
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5510-9690
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Title
The Role of Citation and the Law: A Yale University School of Law Symposium (AALL Publication Series No. 86)
Abstract
Online citations are both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, a citation embedded in a digital document can usually be retrieved by clicking on a link, but on the other, this process eliminates the need to understand any of the information inherent in the citation. To a law student who has only conducted research online, a legal citation is like a wireless passkey—a random string of characters that has no meaning. It is therefore unsurprising that law students have trouble distinguishing between a statute and a regulation. Citations underpin the entire legal research process, tying everything together to form a coherent picture of the law. A detailed understanding of the underlying information in legal citations is critical since a legal citation contains a wealth of information about the cited source’s age, jurisdiction, and degree of persuasiveness. As legal research instructors, we need to teach our students about the information contained in legal citations and how to trace back to the original referenced documents. This paper articulates the overall problem of online citations and suggests several practical methods to address it. Teaching law students to distinguish between different types of legal citations and how they relate to one another will produce better legal researchers and better lawyers.
First Page
257
Last Page
285
Publication Date
2022
Recommended Citation
Matthew L. Timko & Heather J.E. Simmons, The Tangled Web: Teaching the Meaning of Legal Citations in the Online Age, AALL Publication Series No. 86 (Hein, Michael Chiorazzi ed., 2022).
Department
College of Law
Suggested Citation
Matthew L. Timko & Heather J.E. Simmons, The Tangled Web: Teaching the Meaning of Legal Citations in the Online Age, AALL Publication Series No. 86 (Hein, Michael Chiorazzi ed., 2022).
