Case Citation

Case citation is the system used in many countries to identify the decisions in past court cases, either in special series of books called reporters or law reports, or in a 'neutral' form which will identify a decision wherever it was reported. Although case citations are formatted differently in different jurisdictions, they generally contain the same key information.

According to Duhaime's Law Dictionary, a legal citation is:

"An acronym or abbreviation for a law report or other regular or periodic law or legal and authoritative publication directing a reader to the full document.... Formal abbreviations accepted by the legal profession, judges and lawyers, in lieu of long hand transcription of the full title of judgments published in collections known as law reports, or such other authoritative legal publication.

Where cases are published in paper form the citation will usually contain:

• the title of the reports;
• the volume number;
• page number; and
• year of decision.

In some report series, for example in England and Australia, the volumes are not numbered independently of the year: thus the year and volume number (usually no greater than 4) are required to identify which book of the series has the case reported within its covers. In citations of this type it is usual in these jurisdictions for square brackets "" to be applied to the year (which may not be the year that the case was decided: for example, a case decided in December 2001 may have been reported in 2002).

The Internet brought with it the opportunity for courts to publish their decisions on web sites. Decisions of many courts from all over the world can now be found through the website WorldLII and its member institutes.

Most decisions of courts are not published in printed law reports. The expense of typesetting and publishing them has limited the printed law reports to significant cases. Internet publishing of court decisions resulted in a flood of information. The result was that a medium-neutral citation system had to be adopted. This usually contains the following information:

• year of decision
• the abbreviated title of the court; and
• the decision number (not the court file number)

Rather than utilizing page numbers for pin-point references, which would depend upon particular printers and browsers, pin-point quotes refer to paragraph numbers.