§ 1-300. Types of Citation Principles

The detailed principles of citation can be conceived of as falling into four categories:

• Full Address Principles: Principles that specify completeness of the address or identification of a cited document or document portion in terms that will allow the reader to retrieve it.
• Other Minimum Content Principles: Principles that call for the inclusion in a citation of additional information items beyond a retrieval address – the full name of the author of a journal article, the year a decision was rendered or a statutory codification last updated. Some of these principles are conditional, that is, they require the inclusion of a particular item under specified circumstances so that the absence of that item from a citation represents that those circumstances do not exist. The subsequent history of a case must be indicated when it exists, for example; the edition of a book must be indicated when there have been more than one. Most of these additional items either furnish a "name" for the cited document or information that will allow the reader to evaluate its importance.
• Compacting Principles: Principles that reduce the space taken up by the information items included in a citation. These include standard abbreviations ("United States Code" becomes "U.S.C.") and principles that eliminate redundancy. (If the deciding court is communicated by the name of the reporter, it need not be repeated in the citation's concluding parentheses along with the date as it should otherwise be.)
• Format Principles: Principles about punctuation, typography, order of items within a citation, and the like. Such principles apply to the optional elements in a citation as well as the mandatory ones. One need not report to the reader that a cited Supreme Court case was decided 5-4; but if one does, there is a standard form.